Congress could cut Donald Trump's salary to $1

Donald Trump.
(Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

In his first television interview after the election, Donald Trump said he isn't interested in taking a salary as president. "I think I have to by law take $1, so I’ll take $1 a year," he suggested. "But it's a ― I don’t even know what it is. Do you know what the salary is?" Interviewer Leslie Stahl explained that the salary is $400,000 per year, and Trump doubled down on his rejection of the money.

Now, thanks to a rule change made by congressional Republicans this week, that $1 salary may be possible: The House GOP revived a rule dating to 1876 which allows them to cut a specific federal employee's salary to just $1 for budgetary reasons.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.