Fox Anchor Grills Vance on Trump’s $5K Midterms Pledge: ‘They’re Saying Out Loud… the President Is Bribing Voters’
Fox News anchor Bret Baier grilled Vice President JD Vance on the charge that President Donald Trump’s promise of $5,000 checks if Republicans win the midterms amounted to “bribing voters” while potentially adding more than $1 trillion to the government’s tab.
Trump unveiled the proposal during his speech at the GOP midterm convention in Texas on Wednesday night, promising Americans a $5,000 “dividend” if voters keep Republicans in control of Congress in November.
Interviewing Vance after the speech, Baier noted that such a program could cost roughly $1.3 trillion and presented some of the most stinging criticism of the proposal directly to the vice president.
“I can hear the critics’ heads exploding. They’re saying out loud, I guarantee you, ‘the president is bribing voters to vote for Republicans to take over the House, and then he’s bankrupting the country because the deficit and debt is huge and inflation would come back if this comes into play.’ So how do you answer those criticisms?” Baier asked.
“Well, I say first of all, what the president’s talking about is fundamentally a dividend for American workers,” Vance replied.
He continued: “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.”
The vice president argued that revenue generated by Trump’s tariffs was helping the government reduce debt and said Americans should ultimately receive a share of the resulting economic gains.
“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, that we’re, we’re creating in the United States of America.’ I don’t think it’s a controversial idea,” Vance added.
Baier’s pointed questioning comes just two weeks after he publicly pushed back on Trump after the president attacked Fox chief correspondent Jonathan Hunt over his reporting on Iran and demanded Baier “straighten out his flunkies.”
Watch above via Fox News.
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