Trump Dodged My Question about the National Debt

I asked the once-and-possibly-future prez last week in New York City why a second term would be different when it comes to red ink.

Lex Villena/Reason

Last week, I headed to the great bitcoin-themed bar PubKey in Greenwich Village for an event featuring Donald Trump.

Some of his kids had just announced their plans to launch World Liberty Financial, a vaguely defined crypto platform, and I figured it had something to do with that. I met up with my Reason colleague Jim Epstein and we figured we’d have a shot at asking the former president a question or two.

I wanted to talk with him about the national debt held by the public, which tops $27 trillion. It's bigger than the entire American economy—and it's on track to grow faster and faster. Reason’s August-September issue featured a triple fold-out cover charting just how much the debt has grown over time.

Large, growing, unchecked debt is a real problem for many reasons, but the main one is that it seriously depresses economic growth over time, leading ultimately to flat or declining standards of living (this is something that free-market and Marxist economists agree on!).

Between 2017 and 2021, Donald Trump signed legislation that increased future debt by $7.8 trillion, more than George W. Bush and Barack Obama managed in eight years apiece. So I asked Trump: Why should anything be different a second time around?

His answer? “Well, we had a thing called COVID.”

That’s a pretty snappy comeback, but it’s also misleading at best and total bullshit at worst. As the bean counters at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) note, less than half of Trump's new debt was related to pandemic spending. And the COVID-19 relief bill establishing the Paycheck Protection Program, which Trump signed in 2020, was so rife with corruption and waste that one federal prosecutor has called it the "biggest fraud in a generation."

And get this: His new campaign proposals would add another $5.8 trillion to the debt. Trump has called himself the "king of debt." If he gets a second term, he just might become its emperor.

In at least one ad I’ve seen, Trump calls Kamala Harris comrade, suggesting that she’s a communist because of her various calls for possible price controls, national rent control, and the like. Yeah, maybe. But the day after his PubKey appearance, Trump also called for capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent, itself a form of price control. His calls for higher tariffs (especially on Chinese products) may not be Marxist, but it’s really bad economics.

The Tax Foundation, a market-friendly org, scores his various tax and budget plans thus:

That ain’t good. Especially if you believe in smaller government that spends less and does less. The one thing no one should expect from Trump is less government spending smaller deficits, and less debt. Here’s the video of my encounter at PubKey:

And here’s a bonus encounter I had with The Donald, back in 2015, when he appeared at a D.C. rally denouncing Barack Obama’s Iran deal that had been organized by a Tea Party group and Glenn Beck. I caught him coming off the stage and asked him what he thought about libertarianism. His answer: “I like it…a lot of good things, I don’t want to talk to you right now, a lot of good points.” Full video of that rally here.

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