Trump Renews His $5,000 Pledge: Keep Republicans in Congress, He Tells Voters, and the 'Golden Age' Pays Out
In his final speech before the midterms, President Donald Trump revived his promise to give voters $5,000 apiece if Republicans retain Congress — and aimed his closing attacks at Senate candidates in Michigan and Alaska.
President Donald Trump's closing argument came with a price tag. In his final speech before Tuesday's midterm elections, delivered Monday afternoon in front of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, the president revived his pledge to give voters $5,000 apiece if Republicans retain Congress, to celebrate what he called the country's 'golden age,' the New York Post reported. He celebrated the day's steep drop in oil prices, the low unemployment rate, plummeting crime and scant illegal immigration, and framed the election as a defense of all of it.
'The Democrats want to blow all of this up by electing communists and jihadists,' Trump said. 'We can't let that happen. We have to keep our Congress strong, free. A little bit of apple pie.' He conceded the history running against him — 'For some reason, the sitting president doesn't win the midterms, but we gave this a very strong shot' — noting the 29 rallies he held across the country, and he called the opposition's slate 'the most extreme and dangerous slate of candidates in American history.' The election itself arrived about 24 minutes into a speech otherwise devoted to his Washington renovation projects, including the reflecting pool at his back.
His closing appeal narrowed to just two races. The only Democratic candidate he attacked by name was Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who would be the country's first Muslim senator; Trump claimed El-Sayed had qualified for the ballot by soliciting signatures at mosques he characterized as radical — a claim reported here as the president's, in his own words. In Alaska, he attacked Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola over an alleged effort to place a second candidate named Dan Sullivan on the ballot against the Republican incumbent of that name. 'In Alaska, the Democrats conspired to get a fake Dan Sullivan on the ballot to confuse voters and run against the real Dan Sullivan,' he said.
For voters in New York City, where polls open at 6 a.m. Tuesday, the speech was the last national word of the campaign — a sitting president asking the country to keep his party in power and attaching a $5,000 promise to the answer. The prediction markets, as this station reported separately, are pricing the opposite outcome. Both cannot be right, and by Tuesday night the argument is settled the old way: at the ballot box, in the five boroughs and everywhere else.
