Mike Johnson leads Republicans in skeptical response to Trump’s $5,000 election ‘bribe’

Speaker Mike Johnson gave his reaction to Donald Trump’s promise to send Americans a $5,000 check if they protected Republican majorities in Congress during the upcoming midterm elections on Sunday.

The speaker’s refusal to guarantee that such a measure could pass a Republican House and Senate was just one more sign that Trump’s latest Hail Mary was falling flat on Capitol Hill.

Johnson was on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday to discuss the proposal, which Trump made at last week’s GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Texas. The president told a cheering crowd of his supporters and Republican officials that every American adult would receive a one-time payment of $5,000 called the “Trump Dividend” if Republicans held both chambers of Congress in November, a promise that was immediately ripped as a bribe by his detractors online and in the media.

“I commit that Congress will work through it and find consensus on that, like I have to do everything else,” Johnson told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday, when she asked him if it could be passed. Republicans currently control 53 seats in the Senate and a razor-thin margin in the House of Representatives, and have struggled to pass substantial legislation outside of the budget reconciliation framework.

Welker asked why he wasn’t promising directly that such legislation would pass: “President Trump promised that to voters, though. You’re not willing to double down on that promise?”

“I’ll work with the president hand in hand, as I do all the time, and we’ll deliver for the American people. That’s the promise,” said Johnson.

His remarks come as a number of other key Republican voices, like Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis and key conservatives in Congress, have reacted to the plan with emotions ranging from skepticism to full-on rejection.

"I would personally throw everything of my heart and soul to stop it, because it would actually do more damage to working people than would ever help ​them," Rep. David Schweikert, a Republican from Arizona, told Reuters.

At a bruising debate with his Democratic opponent at the Kansas State Fair, Sen. Roger Marshall — one of the early public supporters of the president’s idea — walked back his support for it.

“I’m going to bring in all the information, and then make a decision,” he said, according to The Hill. “This is not the first time I’ve disagreed with President Trump, and it probably won’t be the last.”

Rep. Ralph Norman, who just lost the South Carolina Senate primary to a Trump-backed candidate, Darline Graham Nordone, also came out in opposition last week.

“We’re $40 trillion in debt,” Norman, vice chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, told The New York Times. “To make that dependent on keeping the House, I think is problematic and I don’t know where the money comes from.”

In the Senate, the reception among Republicans seems equally chilly.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune declined to answer a question from a reporter last week on whether the $5,000 Trump Dividend could pass, responding only, “Good question.” On Fox News, he was just as evasive, telling Fox the Senate would “cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Maine Sen. Susan Collins, facing possibly the toughest re-election fight of her career, was outwardly opposed to it: “From the few details we have, it seems that the proposed $5,000 dividend would not have an income cap and would be extraordinarily costly,” she said. “Tax and spending decisions should be made based on the needs of the American people and the state of the economy, they should not appear to be tied to election results.”

The concession from several Republicans that the president’s promise was tied to his desire to keep the House and Senate in Republican hands has only accelerated claims from the left that the money would amount to a bribe of the American public.

Steve Scalise, the number two Republican in the House, denied to CBS News that the money was a bribe. But he told the network: “It’s a reality to say Democrats are against this,” signaling his skepticism of being able to make legislation establishing the dividend pass the House and Senate without Republicans picking up more seats in both chambers.

The president’s announcement comes as his approval rating is hovering in the mid-to-low 30s in most polling and Democrats are projected to make gains in the November midterms, which are now less than two months away.

Driving Trump’s polling plunge is the war in Iran, which appears to be hurtling away from any negotiated settlement and is causing violence to spread across the Middle East, endangering millions of people and global economic activity. In the U.S., gas prices are once again on the rise and the national average has crept past $4 per gallon, while abroad the image the president concocted of a peacemaker as he sought the Nobel Prize has evaporated altogether.

Democrats are preparing a host of targets for congressional investigations should they take power of one or both chambers of Congress in January.