The text from Eric Flores, the Republican nominee for Texas’s 34th Congressional District, is brief. It says, “Attachment: $5,000 Check … Pres. Trump just authorized it,” a reference to the financial windfall that Donald Trump promised for every adult in America if the GOP retains power in the midterms. It is followed by a link to access the “portal” to “submit approval ASAP.”
But like many text-based scams, the link does not follow through as advertised. Instead, it goes to a donation website for Flores.
It’s unclear who is behind the website; in one section, it says that it is paid for by Eric Flores for Congress and another says it is paid for by WinRed, the Republican National Committee’s fundraising platform, and “Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.”
Either way, the donated money will not necessarily be used for electing Flores, who is in a toss-up seat in a district that was made more favorable to him by the Texas gerrymander. The money will primarily help retire his campaign debt. According to FEC records, Flores loaned himself more than half a million dollars to get through the primary in the race to defeat incumbent Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez.
“All contributions given via this page will be first designated to 2026 Primary Debt retirement as allowable,” the website says. “Any funds that cannot be applied to debt will be applied to 2026 General funds.”
A 2022 Supreme Court ruling allowed federal candidates to fundraise unlimited amounts after the date of an election to pay back a personal loan; previously, candidates could only raise funds over $250,000 within 20 days of that election. The Texas primary was March 3, over six months ago, and no funds were listed as repaid by Flores’s campaign as of June 30. Candidates can even charge high interest rates on these personal loans and actually make money off the deal; whether Flores is charging interest is not yet listed with the Federal Election Commission.
Flores, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, Army veteran, and multimillionaire whose campaign material claims he “is guided by his Christian faith and an unwavering commitment to his neighbors,” did not respond to a request for comment, including to explain how the text is not deceitful.
Voters received the text the day after Republicans held a poorly attended rally in Dallas they referred to as a “convention,” though no RNC business got done. During the event, Trump said he would send every adult American citizen a $5,000 “dividend” as long as the GOP held onto the House and the Senate after the midterms, spending that would total about $1.2 trillion.
There is no plan to disburse that money. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed it would not come from taxes or add to the deficit. Maybe it would come from the Trump Platinum Card, Lutnick said, though that does not yet exist. Or maybe from stock investments.
ABC reporter Rachel Scott asked Trump why he needed to pay people to vote if his economic policies are working, and he responded by lurching forward and growling at her. “Not you. Not you!” he said. “Your network … you’re the worst.”
While many Republicans have inched away from Trump’s proposal, either out of concern for the fiscal cost or a desire to restrict the money from allegedly “undeserving” citizens, scammers immediately used it to flood the internet with fake promises of cash. Flores is the first political candidate, to the Prospect’s knowledge, to use the pledge as a bait-and-switch fundraising tool.
The donation text also comes as Republicans are pouring money into Texas elections, including in the heavily Latino Rio Grande Valley, a sign that they know their gerrymandering gambit in Texas is not going to result in the five easy wins they had presumed. As the Prospect reported earlier this week, Republican super PACs are spending millions of dollars even in districts that went to Trump by a wide margin in 2024, including in TX-34, which went to Trump 55-to-45. Republicans have fallen so low in popularity that the seat is seen as a toss-up by the Cook Political Report. Super PACs have spent $660,791 in aggregate there as of last weekend; Flores has $2.9 million.
Gonzalez, meanwhile, has $3.8 million, FEC records show. He says the spending illustrates that Republicans know the districts are toss-ups and that they’re losing ground among voters.
In response to the text, the five-term congressman said, “I’ve never seen anything like this in all my time in Washington.”
