Trump Promised to Eliminate the National Debt in Eight Years. He Added $8 Trillion to It.

The COVID-19 pandemic drove a significant portion of the debt increase — the CARES Act and related relief measures added trillions in necessary emergency spending that was bipartisan. But the trajectory was already off-track before COVID hit. In fiscal year 2019 — before the pandemic — the annual federal deficit had already risen to nearly $1 trillion, up from $585 billion when Trump took office. The Congressional Budget Office had projected, before Trump's tax cuts, that the deficit would fall over that period. Instead it nearly doubled. The cause: the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cut revenue by $1.9 trillion over ten years while spending continued growing, including on defense increases Trump requested.

Trump's response to the rising deficit was to claim the economy was growing so fast it would pay for the cuts. Growth averaged 2.5% annually in his first three years — exactly the same as the final three years of the Obama administration. The promised investment surge from corporate tax cuts didn't materialize: business investment actually declined after the tax cuts passed. The stock market went up substantially — but the bottom 90% of households own just 12% of corporate equities, meaning market gains flowed almost entirely to the already-wealthy. Workers' wages grew, but not at the rate Trump promised, and not faster than the Obama-era trend that Trump inherited.