Trump reveals he has no idea how to pay the $10K he promised air traffic controllers who kept working through the shutdown

President Donald Trump has admitted he does not know where the $10,000 bonus he promised overworked and unpaid air traffic controllers for their efforts during the government shutdown will come from.

With an end to the longest shutdown in American history now in sight after a Republican breakthrough in the Senate, the president sat down for a primetime interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News on Monday evening, where he was asked about the hardships endured by federal workers during the impasse.

Rather than express sympathy, Trump said he was frustrated by exhausted officials calling in sick, a sign of the same strain on the workforce that prompted Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and the Federal Aviation Administration to cut domestic flights at 40 major airports last week in the interests of public safety.

“We should not have had people leaving their jobs,” the president complained, before adding: “The ones that stayed, of which there were a lot of them, I’m sending them a $10,000 bonus…”

“Where’s that money coming from?” Ingraham interjected.

Trump chuckled, shrugged, and said, “I don’t know. I’ll get it from someplace… I always get the money from someplace regardless, it doesn’t matter. I do a lot of bonuses for people because it’s really something that… It’s like the American way, when you think about it.”

A clip of the exchange was widely shared on social media, with liberal pundit Mehdi Hasan responding incredulously: “Imagine. If. Biden. Said. This.”

The president had attacked air traffic controllers on Truth Social earlier in the day, telling the essential safety workers, whose job it is to ensure planes do not crash into each other while traveling through the nation’s busiest airspaces, that they “must get back to work, NOW!!!”

He promised that those who had remained at their posts would receive the $10,000 bonus “for distinguished service to our Country” while those who had been forced to take time off due to ill health would see their pay packets “substantially docked.”

“For those that did nothing but complain, and took time off, even though everyone knew they would be paid, IN FULL, shortly into the future, I am NOT HAPPY WITH YOU,” Trump wrote.

“You didn’t step up to help the U.S.A. against the FAKE DEMOCRAT ATTACK that was only meant to hurt our Country. You will have a negative mark, at least in my mind, against your record.”

Elsewhere in the same interview, Trump brushed aside Ingraham’s suggestion that many Americans were “anxious” about the state of the economy, insisting instead: “The economy is as strong as it’s ever been… I don’t know [that] they are saying that. The polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”

Asked whether affordability, which New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani made central to his winning campaign for City Hall, was “a voter perception issue” or a red flag to which Republicans should pay attention, Trump was again dismissive, answering: “More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats. Are you ready? Costs are way down.”

He was also unsympathetic towards SNAP recipients, who faced losing their benefits because of the shutdown, claiming that food stamps “put the country in jeopardy,” explaining: “People that are able-bodied can do a job, they leave their job because they figure they can pick this up, it’s easier.”

Pressed by Ingraham on how he intended to address expiring health insurance subsidies, which Democrats had demanded support for before this week’s Senate capitulation, Trump said he wanted to bypass insurance companies altogether and deliver financial support to the public directly.

“Everybody is gonna be happy,” he declared. “They’re gonna feel like entrepreneurs. They’re actually able to go out and negotiate their own health insurance. Call it Trumpcare.”

He also said he saw no problem with tying people to 50-year mortgages, bragged about his under-construction White House ballroom and his much-contested record of ending foreign wars, and attacked California Gov. Gavin Newsom and congresswomen Jasmine Crockett and Ilhan Omar, calling the former “a very low IQ person.”

The president also refused to condemn a Chinese diplomat for calling for Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to be beheaded, despite Takaichi only recently welcoming Trump to Tokyo and showering him with gifts.

Perhaps most bizarrely of all, he claimed that in Chicago, scene of two months of contentious ICE raids, “beautiful Black women wearing a MAGA hat” are “begging us to come” to address the Windy City’s alleged law and order problems.