Famous horror author Stephen King recently pointed out something about former President Donald Trump that conservatives don’t like to talk about. That thing? The fact that national debt increased 40 percent under Trump.
Republicans in congress and President Joe Biden are currently in talks to raise the debt ceiling so that country will be able to pay its bills. Every day the issue doesn’t get resolved pushes the country one day closer to debt default, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said would happen on June 1.
One thing they seem to be forgetting is who helped to shepherd them to this position in the first place.
I don’t love that he doesn’t have a citation for this, but let’s dive into it a little bit. Republicans have been chastising Biden as a big spender, and in response he points his finger at Trump. Biden also used this 40 percent number in his own arguments, and said that the 2017 tax cut signed into law by Trump was the biggest contributor to national debt over the “last decade,” per a report in The Washington Post.
He’s trying to tell Republicans that if they want to blame someone for the national debt, blame Trump, whose name has conveniently been missing from House Speaker Kevin McCarty’s mouth during the negotiations, which is what King is pointing out. When Trump took office in 2017, the national debt hovered around $20 trillion.
When he left office that figure jumped to $27.8 million, per the Treasury Department. That’s an increase of 39 percent. So that’s where that number comes from. We could leave it there but there’s some nuance here.
The government spent a lot of money during the coronavirus pandemic. In fact, more than half of the $7.9 trillion added to the national debt happened in the last 10 months of Trump’s term. That means that yes, the debt jumped a lot when Trump was in office, but also, the government had to spend a lot of money to keep things going when everything shut down.
Where does that leave us? At a place where the sitting president is blaming the former president for what’s happening, which if we’re being honest is a purely political move by Biden. That doesn’t mean it’s productive. How is blaming Trump going to change anything?
Sure, Republicans aren’t talking about it but do they need to be? They should be fixing the problem, not pointing fingers at eachother like that Spider-Man meme.
We’ll see what ends up happening, but at least we’ll have King’s Twitter feed to keep us looped in on his views.