In yet another gut punch to those of us already disgusted with Trump policies, reports coming out of Washington now paint him as utterly unconcerned with the debt he’s been racking up as President — and not just the endless trips to Mar-a-Lago.
No, as much as we love to pick at him for his ostentatiousness and need to “look the part” of President with all the finest everything and constant lavish weekends at his luxury resorts, that’s really not what’s building the national debt. It doesn’t come one $50,000 trip at a time. I mean, let me be clear: Those trips are unseemly, and if the emoluments cases he’s currently facing really do turn up his tax returns, I’m convinced that we will find that not only have taxpayers been funding his golf outings, but that he’s actually still collecting the paychecks from his courses — literally being double-paid by America to swing his gold clubs.
But what really cripples the economy, in the long run, is unnecessary budgetary number-shifting from the bottom to the top.
The tax cuts that Republicans passed last year added about $1.5 trillion to our ongoing national debt, and that’s with offsetting spending cuts to crucial programs that benefited the poor, veterans, and elderly.
And maybe the song sounds the same because you’ve been watching Republicans do this for decades: Scream about the national debt while in reality ringing up a larger one, then blaming “tax and spend Democrats” for the resulting mess.
But there’s always been an aspect to it that was hidden from public view, the quiet part of the equation for each Republican President that they never mentioned, which is that they would never pay the piper for their economic policies, because they would be out of office by the time the peons in rural America ever knew what hit them.
Leave it to Trump, however, to say the quiet part loud.
The Daily Beast is reporting today on a briefing Trump took very early in his presidency, in which he was shown charts and graphs and all the visual aids his staffers could come up with — he requires a lot of them — to demonstrate how badly the US national debt was going to blow up in the near future. But according to sources inside the room, that future wasn’t near enough to scare Trump. Upon seeing that the truly debilitating effects of his economic policies would begin to come due post-2024 — when he would have already finished what he thinks will be a second term in office — he told those gathered:
Yeah, but I won’t be here.”
You can tell how much he loves America because he presumably has a little mirror on the map in the Oval Office where the United States should be.
Featured image via screen capture
