Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday sought to deflect criticism that President Donald Trump’s newly proposed $5,000 dividend would further bankrupt the United States, arguing the handout would be offset by tariff revenue. 

Trump promised “every adult citizen” would receive the dividend if the Republican Party preserves majorities in the House and Senate in the elections this fall, during a speech at the GOP’s historic midterm convention in Texas. 

Following the speech, Vance was pressed on the president’s pledge and asked to respond to concerns that “bribing voters to vote for Republicans” would cost the government over $1 trillion, bankrupting the country by spiking the national debt and inflation. The vice president shot back during the Fox News interview, describing the “Trump dividend” as just for “the American middle class,” promising that revenues from the president’s tariffs would pay for the handout, and arguing that the White House is ensuring “wealth is going to go back to the American people.”

“What the president is talking about is fundamentally a dividend for American workers,” Vance said. “We’re taking in an extraordinary amount of revenue because the president of the United States is actually standing up to both foreign companies, but also foreign countries who’ve been taking advantage of America’s workers for pretty much my entire life.”

“All of these tariffs … those penalties have generated a lot of revenue,” he added. “They’ve helped us pay down debt. What the president’s just saying is, if you keep it going to the American people, if you keep us in power and allow us to continue to do these things, then you’re going to share in some of the benefit of this incredible wealth that we’re creating in the United States of America. I don’t think it’s a controversial idea. It’s actually the president of the United States saying we’re all working together, we’re all on the same team, and if we continue to create wealth, that wealth is going to go back to the American people.”

Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) has already vowed to introduce legislation “so that we can get the Trump Dividend passed immediately after the November 3rd election.” 

Trump’s promise to thousands of cheering supporters at the midterm convention in Dallas Wednesday night followed the Treasury Department’s announcement that the U.S. crossed the $40 trillion national debt mark. 

Experts previously told the Washington Examiner that while the U.S. is uniquely positioned to manage debt, the path Washington is on is unsustainable because of the government’s approach to entitlement spending, particularly through Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits. 

“The share of debt to GDP is not what is necessarily concerning. … If you look across Europe or the OECD, many of those countries, but not all of them, have debt levels that are, as a share of GDP, similar to ours,” Adam Michel, the director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, said. “What is really concerning for investors for the sustainability of that debt is future projections — is that over the next 10 years, 20 years, if no political intervention is made, how much worse do things get? And the United States is at the top end of the list of countries that have all of these autopilot programs that are expected to just balloon out of control going into the future.”