Another busted Trump promise: ‘We’ll pay off the national debt.’
The first time President Pinocchio promised that we’ll pay off the debt was when he ran in 2016.
Actually, he said he’d get it paid down in eight years, but voters put a kibosh on that timeline by voting him out after four.
You might say he wasn’t given the chance to see what he could do over an eight year stretch, but going by how the debt ballooned during his first term, I doubt that anybody seriously thinks Trump could have entirely eliminated the debt after four years.
Fact is, despite Trump’s pie-in-the-sky promise, the national debt went from $19.95 trillion in 2017 to $27.75 trillion in 2021, just before he left office.
Biden’s tenure wasn’t much better in terms of reining in the debt, when it grew by a few trillion more, but to give old Joe credit, at least he didn’t pretend that he could make the red ink disappear.
You’d think after his miss on debt-reduction in 2016, Trump the candidate in 2024 would have been a bit more circumspect about knocking down the country’s debt. But no, while he went on and on about winning, winning, and more winning, Trump’s addiction to bombast and exaggeration made him promise, yet again, that he’d eliminate the national debt. He told a North Carolina crowd, mesmerized by his hocum, that “we’ll have all this income coming in, we’ll be powered by growth, we’ll pay off our debt,” and he said it like a Bible-thumping tent preacher.
The crowd ate it up. In some quarters, malarkey still sells. As to reality? Please. It’s Trump’s world. Its inhabitants don’t need no stinkin’ reality.
And what is the stinkin’ reality? Just this: despite Trump’s fantasy-drenched rhetoric, the debt is going up in his second term, just like it did in his first. In 2025 it increased by $2.3 trillion and it’s going up by $6.5 billion a day.
I doubt that Trump is spending much time thinking about how to slow this behemoth’s advance, much less put it down altogether. Just as frustrating is that Democrats aren’t about to make this a campaign issue.
But … watching the size of the debt overtake the size of the economy (the debt-to-GDP ratio) is unnerving. Even more unnerving is Trump’s indifference to an issue that he made so much of during his campaign. And even, even more unnerving is that there doesn’t seem to be any political leadership in sight that gives a damn about any of this.
John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.
Photo: public domain, wikimedia commons
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