JUST IN: Trump Claims His $5K Check Proposal Won’t Need Congressional Approval
Screenshot via X.
President Donald Trump claimed Thursday that his controversial proposal to send a $5,000 check to every American would not need approval from Congress.
During his remarks at the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Texas Wednesday, Trump promised he would send out the “Trump Dividend” checks to every adult U.S. citizen if the GOP keeps its majority in the House and Senate in the November elections.
The plan was swiftly bashed by commentators across the political spectrum, with Democrats mocking it as “socialism for the rich,” fiscal conservatives bemoaning the roughly $1.3 trillion price tag, and reporters noting the numerous times Trump has promised “over and over again” to send checks out to Americans.
In an interview Thursday with CBS News Texas political reporter Jack Fink, Trump addressed his plan.
A transcript of the interview:
FINK: Mr. Trump, last night you proposed “Trump Dividends,” giving every American $5,000 — American citizen, if they have —
TRUMP: — adult —
FINK: — adult citizen $5,000, and I’m wondering if Congress would need to approve that?
TRUMP: Well, we think not. I think they will do it if we needed it. But we think not. The country is doing so well, we’ve taken in trillions of dollars in tariffs and other things. We have now over $20 trillion worth of manufacturing plants and other investments being made in the United States, which is far greater than ever before. And we think it’s something that’ll be good. We do have one proviso, and that’s that the money be spent — that people spend their money in the United States. We don’t want to have that money spent in other countries. We think it’s something that’s really good, popular, and it’s a great infusion.
As CNN senior reporter Daniel Dale and numerous other fact checkers have pointed out, Trump’s math is inaccurate.
Trump has claimed “trillions of dollars in tariff revenue have come in,” but as Dale pointed out, the reality was the figure was “in the hundreds of billions, not close to even $1 trillion, even before the big refunds prompted by the Supreme Court decision that ruled some of the tariffs illegal.”
Specifically regarding Trump saying there has been “over $20 trillion” invested in the U.S. during his second term so far, Dale rejected this as a “false claim”:
That figure is fiction, as we noted when he has made the same or similar claims on numerous previous occasions. The White House has never been able to substantiate it.
As Trump said it this time, the White House’s own website claimed there had been “$11.2 trillion” in “major investment announcements” this term, not “over $20 trillion,” and even the White House figure was a major exaggeration of actual investment. A detailed CNN review in October found the White House was counting trillions of dollars in vague investment pledges – pledges that were about “bilateral trade” or “economic exchange” rather than investment in the US – and vague statements that didn’t even rise to the level of pledges.
The White House figure includes pledges from US-based companies as well as foreign entities. Federal data shows that new foreign direct investment in the US was about $232 billion in 2025.
Watch the video above via CBS News.
This is a breaking news story and has been updated with additional content.
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