Trump’s legacy: $8 trillion-plus in added debt in one term

President Trump promised in the 2016 campaign to eliminate the federal debt over a two-term presidency. That pledge won't come to fruition, and, in fact, he will leave office having added massively to the debt.

“His tenure has been marked by a total disregard for any concern about mounting debt,” said Jim Capretta, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C.

When Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2017, the total national debt was nearly $20 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. It has increased over roughly 30% since, nearly $8 trillion, to $27 trillion, as of Monday.

For comparison, President Barack Obama added roughly $9 trillion to the national debt during his eight years in office, according to the Treasury Department.

Before Trump took office, he railed against the debt. Shortly before winning the White House, he likened its high level to a “time bomb.”

“I will tell you, we are sitting on a time bomb,” he told CBS in June 2016, adding that “I don’t like debt for the country.”

Trump in 2016 vowed to eliminate the federal debt over an eight-year period. At the time, the federal government's debt was over $19 trillion, and most economists thought Trump's pledge ludicrous.

To Capretta, Trump’s actions have been fiscally reckless.

“Trump saw that it would be to his political advantage to be very liberal in terms of spending and tax reductions happening simultaneously,” he said.

In his first year of entering office, Trump signed into law a tax overhaul bill that added $1.9 trillion to the debt over a 10-year period, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the bookkeeper for Congress.

He also increased annual spending, by nearly $800 billion, from $3.85 trillion in 2016 to $4.65 trillion in 2020 (before pandemic relief), according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan organization that examines the spending habits in Washington.

Then came the federal response to the pandemic, which drained federal coffers by $1.76 trillion, according to the CBO.

Obama, too, increased spending to address a crisis, namely the Great Recession. He signed into law the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act," also known as the stimulus, that added $787 billion to the annual deficit. The deficit is the difference between spending and revenues in a given year, while the debt represents accrued deficits.

Trump signed all of these bills into law without trying to reduce the amount of red ink that he was creating, according to Capretta.

“He never really pressed any kind of fiscal policy onto Congress,” he said.

Congress plays an integral role in the tax cuts and spending increases that are enacted into law and could have pressed for more fiscal responsibility in the bills that were passed.

Meanwhile, the trajectory of the debt is upward, according to the CBO. By the end of 2020, federal debt held by the public is projected to equal 98% of GDP, compared to 79% at the end of 2019 and 35% at the end of 2007.