Trump Concludes First Term Having Added Roughly $7.8 Trillion To The National Debt, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Future Taxpayers Had Been Left With Nothing To Do

The Filing

WASHINGTON. Closing the books on a four-year term he had repeatedly promised would erase the national debt entirely, President Donald J. Trump left office in January having instead added roughly $7.8 trillion to it, a sum that fiscal watchdogs ranked among the largest increases of any single presidential term in the nation's history.

The total, which lifted the gross federal debt from approximately $19.9 trillion at his inauguration to roughly $27.8 trillion at its conclusion, was assembled from the 2017 tax cuts, two years of expanded spending, and a pandemic response, leaving the country with a balance sheet that analysts described as comprehensively addressed.

"I'm the king of debt," Mr. Trump had observed during the 2016 campaign, a credential administration officials noted he had spent four years substantiating. The figure was reached, those officials confirmed, without the full elimination the President pledged in 2016, when he assured voters he could retire the entire debt within eight years, a timeline that would have required movement in the other direction.

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the term's signature fiscal achievement, was projected by the Congressional Budget Office to add well over $1 trillion to deficits on its own, with 83 percent of its benefits flowing to the top 1 percent of earners by 2027. Officials characterized the resulting shortfall as intended, explaining that revenue the government had chosen not to collect would now circulate freely among the Americans best positioned to hold it.

"The debt is something future generations will handle, and they are going to be very smart, very capable people," one official said, describing the more than $23,000 in fresh obligation now attached to every American as "a running start." The official added that citizens not yet born had been "given something to work toward."

At press time, congressional Republicans were preparing to spend the next four years gravely concerned about the national debt.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump personally, whose own tax liability was reduced by the 2017 law's cut to top marginal rates and its new 20 percent deduction for pass-through income, a category that encompasses much of his real estate business.
§The Trump Organization, whose real estate holdings benefited from the law's preservation of like-kind exchanges and its favorable treatment of property depreciation and pass-through entities.
§The top 1 percent of earners, projected to receive 83 percent of the tax law's benefits by 2027.
§Large corporations, whose federal tax rate fell from 35 percent to 21 percent, with much of the windfall directed toward record stock buybacks rather than wages.
§Republican donors and the financial industry, who received a long-sought tax reduction and, in the bond market, a historic new supply of Treasury securities to underwrite and trade.
§Foreign creditors, including the governments of Japan and China, whose holdings of interest-bearing U.S. debt expanded along with the deficit.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment