On Tuesday, attorney George Conway, a frequent Trump critic and husband of White House Special Counsel Kellyanne Conway, pointed out that three years into Trump’s first term as president, the national debt increased by $3 trillion, bringing it to over $23 trillion now. Conway cited figures from the National Debt Tweets in his tweet.
As a Republican presidential candidate, Trump said he would eliminate the national debt in eight years, which was $19 trillion in 2016, according to The Washington Post. Asked by journalist Bob Woodward if that would involving raising taxes to ease the problem, Trump responded: “I don’t think I’ll need to. The power is trade. Our deals are so bad.”
But as of January, President Trump signed $4.7 trillion more into the debt until 2029, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB).
At a private dinner with wealthy donors last Friday, just days before the third anniversary of his inauguration, the president brushed off critics amid concerns of his spending and growing national debt. “Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country,” he said, as reported by The Washington Post.
The national debt has increased significantly under both the Bush and Obama administrations, increasing about 101 percent from the end of Clinton’s administration to the end of Bush’s. Republicans criticized Obama for doubling debt by nearly $9 trillion.
According to CRFB President Maya McGuineas, the deficit would have increased under Trump, even if he hadn’t signed any legislation. But the new policies he signed beginning in 2017 reflect further spending, which is unusual during a period of economic growth.
“Just like the economic performance isn’t totally attributable to the president, the existing policies that are baked into the cake don’t reflect Trump’s initiative,” MacGuineas told Newsweek. “The laws he’s signed, though, do. And in this case, he’s signed into law two major tax cuts–the one that everybody notices.”
The two pieces of legislation that added the most to the national debt are the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and the 2018 and 2019 Bipartisan Budget Acts (BBA), according to CRFB. In addition to these, the ACA Tax Repeal and other legislation–which included disaster relief, emergency spending, and ACA tax delays, signed in December 2019–added a combined total of about $665 billion.
MacGuineas also said that laws Trump has signed have increased spending, without revenue increasing enough to maintain it, creating more debt than expected. “There were a number of increases that were already on track that came from our growing healthcare and retirement cost. But President Trump massively exacerbated that problem with the laws he signed, which included creating lower revenues and higher spending. And obviously, because of the laws of math, that means we’re left with much larger borrowing,” she said. “What’s unusual is that during a period of economic expansion the borrowing would be increasing from year to year, but that’s what’s been happening under President Trump.”