*President Donald Trump attacked reparations for descendants of enslaved Americans during a Republican convention speech in Dallas, saying the country cannot afford them and characterizing the people seeking reparations as people who “hate our country.”
Speaking at the Republican Midterm Convention on Sept. 9, Trump told the audience, “They wanna steal your money for reparations. They wanna basically punish you for crimes that you never committed that happened hundreds of years ago.”
Then Trump made a striking comparison to his own proposal to give American adults $5,000 if Republicans retain control of Congress.
“And our country doesn’t have that kind of money,” Trump said of reparations. “They have the money for $5,000, but they don’t have that kind of money. And give it to the people that hate our country.” Moments later, he added: “The people that hate our country are asking for it.”
Trump’s remarks are documented in the full Roll Call Factba.se transcript of his Dallas address.
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What Trump Did — and Didn’t — Say
A viral Instagram video connected Trump’s remarks to polling showing roughly three-quarters of Black Americans support reparations and concluded that Trump was effectively saying those Black Americans “hate our country.”
There’s an important distinction: Trump did not say that 75% of Black Americans hate America. Nor did he cite that statistic in the reparations portion of his speech.
What he explicitly said was that “the people” asking for reparations “hate our country.”
The polling statistic, however, is real. Pew Research Center found in a 2022 survey that 77% of Black adults believed descendants of people enslaved in the United States should be repaid in some way. Only 30% of American adults overall agreed.
Trump Pits Reparations Against $5,000 ‘Dividend’
Trump’s own comparison creates another question: If the federal government cannot afford reparations, how would it afford his promised checks?
Trump pledged during the same Dallas convention to provide every adult American citizen with a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” if Republicans maintain control of the House and Senate in November.
Reuters reports the proposal could cost roughly $1.2 trillion, before hundreds of billions of dollars in potential additional interest costs. Congress would have to authorize the spending.
Trump has not provided a detailed funding mechanism. Vice President JD Vance subsequently suggested wealthier Americans might not qualify and said tariff revenue could help finance the payments.
Reparations Remain an Active Black Political Issue
Reparations are far from a theoretical debate. As EURweb has reported, California established the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery in 2025 as part of its continuing effort to implement reparative policies.
Cash payments are only one form of reparations under consideration nationally and at state and local levels. Proposals have also addressed property loss, housing discrimination, education, economic opportunity and other documented consequences of slavery and discriminatory government policies.
Trump’s Dallas remarks nevertheless reduce the debate to a stark choice: his proposed $5,000 payments are money America can find, while reparations are money America doesn’t have — and the people asking for the latter, he says, “hate our country.”
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