Despite Trump’s promises, fiscal deterioration gets worse.
President Trump has a long history of lying. All his lies have some consequence, but to me the most insidious is the one he has repeatedly told about paying down the federal debt. I say “insidious” because the size of the debt has been creeping up regularly since he took office in 2025, hitting numbers that are eye-popping and should be of concern to any of us that think about the country we’re handing off to our kids.
The Congressional Budget Office just released a report showing that the U.S. borrowed $1.8 trillion for the first ten months of fiscal 2026. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s statement on this news, coming from its president Maya MacGuineas, is stark about the consequences of the debt monster that we’ve created and what to do about this fiscal Frankenstein:
“The United States has borrowed more in the first 10 months of fiscal year 2026 than it did in all of fiscal year 2025. Today’s Treasury figures show we’re already $1.8 trillion in the red, suggesting we’re on track to borrow over $2 trillion this fiscal year.
In July alone, we borrowed $432 billion – that’s $14 billion per day. We are already feeling the consequences of this extreme borrowing – high interest rates, trillion-dollar interest payments, and looming trust fund insolvency that threatens benefits for Social Security and Medicare. As we are about to hit the milestone of $40 trillion in gross national debt, it is clear the time to restore fiscal responsibility is now. Although action is long overdue, it is never too late to start correcting course.
Lawmakers should come together and agree to a plan – or at least a process for a plan – to reduce deficits to 3% of GDP and put the budget on a sustainable path.”
There has been an ongoing debate about the risks of high national debt. The conversation pits “modern monetary theorists” (they’re ok with national debt) against economists who have serious misgivings about debt-creep.
From a public/political perspective, I don’t recall ever hearing a politician say that the national debt is a good thing. Most, if not all, politicians denounce it … then do nothing to reduce the size or speed of its ascent.
Trump is no exception. He’s part of that pernicious rhetoric gap. He railed against the nation’s debt and promised to do something about it, but typically, he lied about his intentions.
And he lied not just once, but twice. Candidate Trump, both in 2016 and 2024, made eliminating, or at least whittling down, the national debt a campaign promise.
Hewing to the cynic’s maxim that promises are meant to be broken, the president who once called himself “the king of debt,” proved to be the “king of the B.S.ers.” Despite Trump’s campaign vows, the debt increased during both of his terms.
And so it goes. The liar keeps lying, the deterioration keeps deteriorating.
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 als 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
The South Dakota Standard is offered freely and is supported by our readers. We have no political or commercial sponsorship. If you'd like to help us continue our mission to advance independent political and social commentary, you can do so by clicking on the "Donate" button that's on the sidebar to your right.
