President Donald Trump likes to claim that his administration has been a radical departure from the past, but one conservative commentator has statistics which tell a very different story.
Simply put, Trump has continued a pattern that began under Republicans like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush of running as fiscal conservatives and then continuing the high-spending policies of their predecessors Nick Gillespie, editor at large at Reason Magazine, wrote on Sunday. Indeed, each president has actually spent more than the one before him.
“But what about Donald Trump and Joe Biden?” Gillespie added. “Surely, here is a major rupture! If nothing else, it's widely assumed that the return of Trump to a second, nonconsecutive term augured a ‘vibe shift’ that either saved America or destroyed it, depending on your partisan affiliation. But even here, I'd argue, there's more continuity than not.”
First, Gillespie slammed Trump and Biden for being part of a “gerontocracy” in which his feeble performance during the June 2024 presidential debate compelled him to drop out of the election.
“Even the most die-hard Trump supporter must suspect that the Republican incumbent is losing at least some of his marbles lately,” Gillespie said of the Republicans. “His apocalyptic statements warning that ‘a whole civilization will die’ due to his Iran war policies don't suggest he's in great mental shape; neither does his insistence that he stopped a nonexistent war between Cambodia and Armenia. His odd defense of posting an image to Truth Social of himself as a very Jesus-like character ministering to a sick man didn't help anything. In explaining his goal in sharing the since-deleted and much meme-ified picture, he said, ‘I thought it was me as a doctor.’ He's either lying (which is not good) or really, really out of touch (even worse).”
Yet Gillespie’s primary complaint about Trump and Biden isn’t their respective states of cognitive decline, but their similarly profligate spending policies.
“Biden ramped up spending, especially on his way out the door,” Gillespie wrote. “Trump is doing more of the same. Yes, he's pushing to cut certain types of spending, but in the aggregate, it's just more and more red ink as far as the eye can see, a tendency that was true of him during his first term, both before and after the pandemic.”
He added, “In fact, federal spending under Trump increased $1,441 per person before COVID fully opened the spigot. Of the $7.8 trillion in new debt he signed off on in his first term, less than half was related to COVID relief. And by every indication—including his recent budget proposal, which calls for a record-high defense budget of $1.5 trillion—Trump aims to sign off on ever-increasing amounts of spending until his term expires in 2029.”
In addition to increasing spending, Trump has issued massive cuts to social welfare services on which his low-income supporters rely while increasing benefits to his wealthy donors.
“The message to everyday Americans is: beware,” wrote The Guardian's Eduardo Porter earlier this month, who added that “to the average American, however, it must be hard to understand Trump’s budget proposal as anything but a betrayal. He won the presidency twice, largely by promising help for America’s beleaguered working stiffs, forever ignored by cosmopolitan elites in power, invested in foreign trade agreements and open borders policies. The budget proposal confirms that, if it ever was sincere, this commitment has by now been forgotten.”
As examples, Porter included “the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could see its budget cut by over $15bn, 12% less compared with this year,” while his “Big Beautiful Bill” includes so many cuts to health programs that it is expected to “push 15 million Americans to lose health insurance, according to some analysts.”
Similarly Fortune’s business editor Nick Lichtenberg noted in March that under Trump the United States national debt crossed $39 trillion for the first time, meaning Trump had added $1 trillion to it since October.
“The milestone, confirmed in Wednesday’s Daily Treasury Statement, lands amid a politically charged moment: it comes roughly two weeks before the ten-year anniversary of President Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to eliminate the national debt within eight years,” Lichtenberg wrote. “Instead, the gross national debt has roughly doubled since Trump first took office—it was $19.9 trillion in January 2017.”
Lichtenberg also cited a Peterson Foundation study which projects the debt will exceed $40 trillion before the 2026 midterm elections.
“Perhaps the most alarming dimension of the crossing is what it costs just to carry the debt,” Lichtenberg argued. “Net interest payments on the national debt are projected to exceed $1 trillion in fiscal year 2026—nearly triple the $345 billion in interest the government paid in 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. In the first three months of the current fiscal year alone, net interest payments reached $270 billion, already surpassing the nation’s defense spending for the same period.”
