The politics of fraud seep into our system of government sometimes in the most pernicious manner. During both the Obama and Biden administrations, the Republican Party used as a cudgel the periodic need to raise the national debt limit in accordance with legislation passed in 1917. The disingenuous cries against raising the debt limit were so loud it drowned out any rational consideration that the same voices were responsible themselves for creating the spending obligations that could only be paid through the raising of additional debt. Whether or not the debt limit is a useful tool for limiting profligate spending is debatable. It certainly has never curtailed spending, and it only serves to create crises of hypocritical despair over meeting the already legislated spending obligations of the U.S. government.
No such voices of protest were heard during the first Trump administration. The debt limit was quietly raised twice and suspended twice. When President Trump was sworn into office in 2017, the national debt was around $19.9 trillion. When he reluctantly (a euphemism) left office in 2021, the national debt had ballooned to $27 trillion, the single highest increase in the national debt during any four-year term of a president. For the guy who prides himself on being the greatest at everything, in this instance he certainly deserved that moniker. It wasn’t just COVID. The pre-COVID Trump administration debt trajectory was steeper than any other president in our history (and, while the Biden administration was also burdened with COVID spending, it will have added another $4 trillion to the national debt, 40% less than the over $7 trillion added during the first Trump term).
Now the President-elect has called for the repeal of the debt limit law, or at a minimum, raising it during the last days of the Biden administration so he can wash his hands of the need to raise it during his upcoming administration. Can we guess why? Of course, a man who made his money in real estate, built on debt, wants to be fully unhindered in loading on as much debt as he can to pump the economy during his upcoming administration, like he did the first time in office (the “greatest economy in the history of the world” was built on nothing more than debt priming the pump, and we have the inflation and high interest rates to prove it). And, he certainly doesn’t want the embarrassment of possibly a true Republican voicing objections during future debt limit votes (of course the MAGA congresspersons will be dutifully silent, somehow their debt limit raises being totally different than during Democrat administrations).
It is more than hypocrisy. It is defrauding the American people. The one thing Trump does know well is debt. It has worked well sometimes, and sometimes not (reference the multiple bankruptcies of the Trump organization), but in any case, it has been someone else that had to pay the bill. For him to never have to worry about the national debt is letting the fox into the henhouse. Oh, we could have a glorious next four years with the purse strings undone for Donald Trump. But what comes after that? Donald Trump will be 82 years old in 2028 and a wealthy man. Will he care about how much debt he has added to burden our children? Not that real estate guy; not the King of Debt.
Richard Hegger lives in Somers.