'Have their hands dirty': Billionaire GOP donor throws down on Trump policies

US President Donald Trump speaks during a Republican campaign rally at F&M Bank Arena in Clarksville, Tennessee, US, October 10, 2026. REUTERS Eric Lee

Billionaire Ken Griffin said Republican lawmakers and President Donald Trump made a huge blunder by cutting taxes even further last year, reports Bloomberg.

“[W]e didn’t have the fiscal space to renew the tax cuts,” Griffin said in a Tuesday interview at the Future of Global Markets Conference in New York. Griffin was particularly unnerved at U.S. debt eclipsing $40 trillion. And he added that Republicans “have their hands dirty over the tax cuts the last two years, more than spending increases.”

Griffin, a Republican benefactor whose business empire includes hedge fund Citadel and market-maker Citadel Securities, said the solution is to “grow the damn economy,” and to push Europeans to grow theirs, too.

But he quipped that Trump’s “tariff war with Europe is a fiasco.”

Despite his criticism of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Bloomberg reports Griffin has been one of “biggest donors this election cycle” of Republicans, even to the point of spending tens of millions of dollars to back the Republican Party’s candidates.

He’s given $10 million to the Senate Leadership Fund and $5 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund. And he also spent “$10 million supporting Byron Donalds,” who’s running for Florida governor. Millions more of his money has gone to backing Republicans in close races, including $2.5 million each for Senators Dan S. Sullivan of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, reported Bloomberg.

The United States budget deficit, which increased to $1.99 trillion this fiscal year from $1.78 trillion in 2025, “approached its highest level since the pandemic, as spending on the military, safety net programs and interest on the debt dwarfed the Trump administration’s cost cuts, Treasury Department figures showed,” according to New York Times reporter Alan Rappeport.

The ever-widening gap between what the U.S. government spends and what it collects in taxes and other revenue comes at a critical moment when investors are already getting spooked about the nation’s surging debt load. These concerns are coupled with stubborn inflation resulting from Trump’s tariffs and his ongoing attacks on Iran and the subsequent bottleneck of Middle Eastern oil.

All of this is driving up borrowing costs and boosting interest rates for mortgages, credit cards and auto loans, pushing them to their highest levels in two decades earlier this month.

The last time the deficit topped $2 trillion was in 2021, when the pandemic prompted Congress to approve a huge stimulus package to help keep the economy afloat. But analysts point out that there is no pandemic-style crisis forcing the nation to take on that load this time — just a president’s extravagant spending policies.

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