Trump Shrugs Off Reports Of An Approaching Debt Crisis
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Donald Trump has reportedly told aides that he doesn’t care about the national debt because it won’t really become a problem until after he leaves office:
Since the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s aides and advisers have tried to convince him of the importance of tackling the national debt .
Sources close to the president say he has repeatedly shrugged it off, implying that he doesn’t have to worry about the money owed to America’s creditors—currently about $21 trillion—because he won’t be around to shoulder the blame when it becomes even more untenable.
The friction came to a head in early 2017 when senior officials offered Trump charts and graphics laying out the numbers and showing a “hockey stick” spike in the national debt in the not-too-distant future. In response, Trump noted that the data suggested the debt would reach a critical mass only after his possible second term in office.
“Yeah, but I won’t be here,” the president bluntly said, according to a source who was in the room when Trump made this comment during discussions on the debt.
The episode illustrates the extent of the president’s ambivalence toward tackling an issue that has previously animated the Republican Party from the days of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of Barack Obama.
But for those who have worked with Trump, it was par for the course. Several people close to the president, both within and outside his administration, confirmed that the national debt has never bothered him in a truly meaningful way, despite his public lip service. “I never once heard him talk about the debt,” one former senior White House official attested.
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[R]ight-leaning reformers shouldn’t be holding their breath.
The Washington Post recently reported that Trump had instructed his Cabinet to devise plans to trim their budgets in an effort to reduce the federal deficit. But Trump also set strict limits on what sorts of programs could be cut—and quickly proceeded to propose increased spending in other areas of the federal government.
“He understands the messaging of it,” the former senior White House official told The Daily Beast. “But he isn’t a doctrinaire conservative who deeply cares about the national debt, especially not on his watch… It’s not actually a top priority for him… He understands the political nature of the debt but it’s clearly not, frankly, something he sees as crucial to his legacy.”
The former Trump official adding, “It’s not like it’s going to haunt him.”
To be fair to the President, he has never been known as a deficit or national debt hawk in the manner that many other Republicans and conservatives have been. It’s an issue that he rarely brought up on the campaign trail except as a cudgel to attack his opponents in the race for the Republican nomination or the General Election or the Administration of former President Obama and former President Clinton. Since he has become President, he’s done nothing of substance to deal with either rising budget deficits or the broader national debt, nor has he put forward anything resembling a coherent plan to deal with either of these issues. The fact that he would say things like this behind closed doors, while shocking were it coming from another President, is therefore entirely consistent with the generally lackadaisical attitude he’s shown toward the issue from the time that he entered politics. Granted, it is an irresponsible position for a sitting President to take but that’s something that can be said about so many other things that this President has done and said over the past two years that it hardly comes as a shock anymore.
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Imagine if Obama had said that.
I wonder on what basis Trumpsters feel that history is going to judge them kindly.