Around this time eight years ago, Donald Trump appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio show and reflected on the nation’s fiscal health. “We have $21 trillion in debt … a number that is unthinkable,” the president said in July 2018. “But that will go down very quickly.”
Like so many of the Republican’s assurances, the comments seem like a cruel joke in hindsight.
Last week, Americans learned that this year’s budget deficit had reached nearly $1.8 trillion, which is already higher than all of last year’s deficit, and that’s with two months still remaining in the fiscal year. This week, the public received some related news: The United States’ national debt, which Trump considered “unthinkable” when it reached $21 trillion, has now crossed the $40 trillion threshold.
As the public considers the implications of this, there are a handful of things to keep in mind.
The problem is getting worse faster than anyone expected: Everyone knew this was likely to happen eventually, but as The Washington Post reported this week, we’re racking up debt faster than earlier independent analyses, thanks almost entirely to the cost of GOP tax breaks, the war in Iran and the White House’s failed tariffs agenda. The article added, “The faster accumulation of debt comes at a perilous moment. An array of concerns, including inflation, the war in Iran and rising debt levels around the world, are driving investors to dump government bonds.”
Trump promised voters a very different outcome: As a candidate in 2016, the Republican told voters he had unique expertise in budgetary issues, which would enable him to eliminate the deficit and start paying off the debt. Trump delivered the opposite results, adding nearly $7.8 trillion to the national debt in just one term, and most of that total was racked up before the Covid-19 crisis. As a candidate in 2024, he repeated his earlier promises, before again delivering the opposite results: Trump has added nearly $4 trillion in debt since returning to the White House a year and a half ago.
Trump and congressional Republicans are to blame: There’s no great mystery here. The debt is growing quickly as a direct result of GOP policies, including last year’s tax breaks for the wealthy and the war in Iran.
Trump and congressional Republicans don’t seem to care: For decades, Republican officials have expressed hysterical concerns about “fiscal responsibility” every time there’s been a Democratic president. Indeed, younger readers might find this difficult to believe, but in the not-too-distant past, Republicans treated the budget deficit as one of the single most important crises facing the United States. The gap between what the government spends and what it takes in, GOP officials said, threatened to bankrupt the nation, crash the economy and ruin the lives of our children and grandchildren.
But as this year’s deficit approaches the $2 trillion mark, and the debt passes the $40 trillion mark, those same Republicans are suddenly silent on the issue.
Trump and congressional Republicans aren’t even pretending to have a plan to address this: It’s not as if the GOP has a bad plan to get the nation’s fiscal house in order; it’s that the party isn’t even trying to address the issue at all.
Earlier Republican warnings suddenly look ridiculous: Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, GOP officials said that if the national debt eclipsed the size of the overall U.S. economy, it would spell immediate doom. For the first time since World War II, the national debt has now eclipsed the size of the overall U.S. economy, and Republicans continue to pretend that the economy has reached its “golden age.”
Remember 1998? Around this time 28 years ago, Bill Clinton proudly declared that the deficit was officially gone, and record surpluses soon followed. At the time, the United States was on track to do the unthinkable: pay off its national debt. Republican governance soon followed, setting us on a path to $40 trillion in debt.
The historical pattern is worth remembering: Despite the conventional wisdom about which party has credibility on fiscal issues, over the past several decades, budget deficits have grown by massive amounts under every Republican administration (Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2 and Trump), while shrinking under every Democratic administration (Clinton, Obama and Biden).
The next Democratic president needs to be prepared: Time will tell who prevails in the 2028 presidential election, but if it’s a Democrat, they’ll need to understand that they’re inheriting a severe budgetary mess, which will be met by a new round of GOP hysterics about the mess that Republicans themselves created.
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