President Trump’s campaign was marked by a tendency to make wild boasts about how he would fix the country’s problems accompanied by vague or contradictory details on how he would pull off such fantastic feats.
The most famous example is probably his boast that he would build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it — neither part of which has come into fruition. But much more far-fetched were his haughty predictions about how he would tackle the debt, even while proposing fiscal policies that would make that impossible.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump told the Washington Post that he’d get rid of the national debt “over a period of eight years” and also declared himself the “king of debt.”
“Nobody knows debt better than me,” he told CBS. “I’ve made a fortune by using debt and if things don’t work out, I renegotiate the debt.” He continued to argue that, “we are sitting on a time bomb and Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a clue. And President Obama has pretty much doubled the debt since he’s been in office and somebody’s going to pay a big price. We have to start chopping that debt down.”
At the same time, during the campaign, he eschewed reform of the major entitlement programs Social Security and Medicare while arguing for increasing defense spending — effectively taking most of the spending side of the budget off of the table while proposing tax cuts.
A Daily Beast story has drawn attention for recounting that, early in his presidency, advisers showed Trump charts and graphs detailing the unsustainable fiscal trajectory of the U.S. in the coming decades if nothing is done, and that his response was, “Yeah, but I won’t be here.”
As will all stories based on anonymous sources, we cannot say for sure that this happened as described. But we don’t need an anonymous quote to know that Trump does not consider debt reduction a priority.
Trump’s biggest legislative accomplishment has been a $1.5 trillion tax cut. Now, it’s true that tax cuts can only be described as a “cost” if one believes that all income earned in the U.S. is by right the property of government. Surely, to the millions of taxpayers who will be sending less of their incomes to Washington, far from being a cost, the tax cut will represent a savings.
That having been said, it’s undeniable that even after taking economic growth into account, lowering taxes will on net reduce federal revenue and widen deficits unless offset by spending cuts.
The problem is, Trump, with the cooperation of Republicans in Congress, has not fought to make those tax cuts more sustainable by pairing them with spending reductions. Trump and Republicans, with unified control of government, were unwilling to reform Medicare or Social Security and unable to reform Medicaid or repeal Obamacare. At the same time, they broke 2011 spending caps that were the remaining legacy of the brief period of Republican interest in debt reduction, to increase military spending.
The result? The fiscal picture now looks worse under Trump than it did at the end of the Obama era.
In Jan. 2017, the Congressional Budget Office projected that deficits would total $8.6 trillion through 2026. The latest forecasts (and actual results from the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years) now say the number is over $11 trillion. And that isn’t purely a result of the CBO’s scoring of the tax cuts — spending is also expected to be $1.1 trillion more than was projected at the end of the Obama era.
The more serious long-term debt picture has also deteriorated. In June 2018, CBO reported that the debt picture was worse through 2041 than it was in the prior report in March 2017, a few month’s into Trump’s presidency.
With a resurgent Democratic Party now in control of the House with an ambitious social welfare agenda and a restive base feeling more justified in throwing fiscal concerns to the wind, there is even less hope for a serious effort at debt reduction in the coming two years.
Trump supporters may be tempted to point the fingers at weak-kneed congressional Republicans. After all, Trump was willing to sign a repeal of Obamacare that phased out the Medicaid expansion and reformed the costly program into a system of block grants to the states. He also submitted budgets that proposed cuts that were not adopted. Surely, Republicans in Congress deserve a large share of the blame.
That having been said, it’s also not fair to absolve of responsibility a president who campaigned on the idea that other leaders were weak, and he by contrast was a master dealmaker who could get things done.
Furthermore, Trump was praised in many quarters for his political acumen in rejecting the unpopular Republican push for entitlement reform in favor of a more populist position that embraced sustaining the status quo of Social Security and Medicare. So he doesn’t get, now, to blame others for the growing fiscal mess that’s a natural consequence of his political calculation.
As the sobering numbers mount, a large share of the responsibility rests with Trump. It’s yet another lesson that during political campaigns, it’s easy to obscure details with lofty rhetoric, but once president, rhetoric doesn’t change reality.
