DALLAS — President Donald Trump pledged Wednesday to send every American adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of both chambers of Congress in November’s midterm elections, an extraordinary gambit aimed at reversing his party’s sagging fortunes ahead of the vote.

Speaking during a lengthy speech at the Republican Party’s midterm convention at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Trump framed the proposed payment as a reward directly tied to Republican electoral success.

“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump told the crowd. “It will be called the Trump dividend.”

Trump elaborated further on the promise, comparing the payment to a corporation distributing profits to its shareholders.

“Here is my promise: If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000, very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders,” Trump said.

The president said the money would need to be spent within the United States, though he did not offer specific details on how that requirement would be enforced. He attributed the source of funding for the proposed dividend to what he described as the “tremendous economic success” of his administration’s policies, drawing a contrast with Democrats.

“The reason the Democrats can’t do that is because they don’t do tariffs, they don’t take in money, all they know is poverty,” Trump said.

Within an hour of Trump’s remarks, Vice President JD Vance appeared to narrow the scope of the proposal, suggesting the dividend payments would not extend to wealthy Americans. Vance indicated the payments could be financed through tariff revenue, which totaled approximately $154.5 billion during the first 10 months of fiscal 2026, according to figures cited by Time magazine.

Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, publicly endorsed Trump’s proposal following the speech, saying he would prepare legislation to advance the dividend payments after the midterm elections.

Any such payment would require formal congressional approval before it could be implemented, and analysts have raised significant questions about the plan’s fiscal feasibility. The proposal would likely cost more than $1 trillion to fully fund, further straining a federal budget that already runs an annual deficit of nearly $1.8 trillion. The proposed dividend amount would also far exceed total U.S. tariff revenue collected to date, a gap made even more pronounced after the Supreme Court struck down much of the president’s broader tariff program last year.

Wednesday’s proposal follows a pattern of similar cash-payment pledges Trump has floated since returning to office, none of which have yet resulted in actual payments being issued to Americans. Earlier in his second term, during efforts led by Elon Musk to cut federal government spending, Musk proposed a “DOGE dividend” of $5,000 per person, an idea Trump said at the time he supported, though it never materialized into an actual program. Trump has separately floated $2,000 stimulus payments tied to tariff revenue, and discussed potential payments exceeding $1,000 tied to savings from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies. Earlier this year, more than 1 million U.S. military service members received a one-time “warrior dividend” payment of $1,776, tied symbolically to the year of American independence.

Trump made his latest promise amid a challenging political environment for his party heading into the midterms. Public opinion polling has shown his approval ratings sitting in the low 30s, with voters expressing growing frustration over elevated prices and the ongoing military conflict involving Iran that Trump’s administration has pursued.

Trump directly acknowledged the political stakes of the upcoming election during his Dallas remarks, framing the midterms as effectively a referendum on his own leadership even though he is not personally on the ballot.

“I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” Trump said.

Historical trends have generally worked against the party controlling the White House during midterm elections. Since 1938, the president’s party has lost seats in the House of Representatives in all but two midterm cycles, with 1998 and 2002 standing as the lone exceptions. The Senate has offered somewhat better historical odds for the incumbent president’s party, which has gained seats in that chamber during midterms on six occasions over the same period, including in 2018 and 2022.

Trump has continued raising substantial campaign funds ahead of November’s elections, having secured approximately $1.4 billion in financial commitments since winning the 2024 election, according to a source cited by the New York Post, drawing on contributions to the Republican National Committee and his affiliated super PAC, Make America Great Again, Inc.

Wednesday’s dividend announcement adds to a broader pattern in which Trump has repeatedly floated large-scale direct payments to Americans throughout his second term without any of the proposals ultimately being enacted into law. Critics have pointed to that pattern as evidence the latest $5,000 pledge should be viewed skeptically, given both the significant fiscal obstacles standing in the way of its implementation and the requirement that any such payment first clear Congress, a body Republicans would need to retain control of in order for the pledge to even become a live legislative possibility.

With the midterm elections set for Nov. 3, the coming weeks are likely to bring further scrutiny of Trump’s proposed dividend, along with continued debate over its feasibility, funding source and the practical mechanics of how such a payment might actually be distributed and enforced, should Republicans succeed in maintaining their current control of both the House and Senate.

For years, researchers concerned about existential AI risks have argued that powerful systems could eventually act in ways that conflict with human interests. Critics often refer to them as “AI doomers”.

But as details of the OpenAI incident have emerged, those concerns have grown, including among some researchers working in AI labs.

The Silicon Valley giant’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, said the risks associated with AI are “unfortunately going to grow from here” as he and others are building what he calls “an alien intellect exceeding our own”.

In a lengthy blog post, he admitted that the outbreaks at OpenAI showed that his AI agents “went against the spirit of the values they were taught”.

The issue for OpenAI, Anthropic and other tech giants is that no one seems to have cracked the so-called alignment problem – in other words, whether AI aligns with human values.

Pachocki defines alignment as a “high-level set of principles” that artificial intelligences should adhere to no matter what the task or scenario is.

Currently, AI systems are very good at pursuing objectives set by their users, but they do it literally rather than intuitively. The analogy often used is that of a wish-granting genie with a magic lamp: they follow the exact letter of an instruction, even if doing so creates other problems. AI doesn’t have the same instinctive moral guardrails as humans.