Old Video Of Trump Warning USA $24T Debt Was ‘Point of No Return’ Surfaces, But Now $40T Debt Under His Watch (watch)
Donald Trump once told voters that a £17.6 trillion ($24 trillion) national debt would be the moment America became ‘unsalvageable’, and the country has now sailed past £29.4 trillion ($40 trillion) on his own watch.
The gross national debt crossed the $40 trillion threshold for the first time in history this week, according to the United States Treasury, deepening fears of a slow-building fiscal crisis.
The milestone lands roughly a decade after Trump, then a presidential candidate, cast himself as the one man who could tame the country’s borrowing and warned that a far smaller figure would push the nation past the point of no return.
The gap between that promise and the present total, much of it added during his two terms, has turned an old campaign warning into an awkward measure of his record.
The debt was one of Trump’s signature grievances during his first run for the White House. In a 2016 campaign speech, he told supporters that the country was approaching a threshold from which it could not recover.
‘We’re at $18 trillion now. We’re soon going to be at $20 trillion,’ he said, before pointing to a higher figure economists had flagged. ‘That $24 trillion, we’re very close; that’s the point of no return. That’s when we become Greece. That’s when we become a country that’s unsalvageable.’
He paired the warning with a boast about his own command of the subject. ‘I call myself the king of debt. I’m great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me,’ he told an audience in 2016, adding that while he liked debt for his own businesses, he did not like it for the country, which he said was ‘sitting on a time bomb’.
The pledge that followed was specific. Speaking to The Washington Post in 2016, Trump said he could clear the entire national debt, then about £14 trillion ($19 trillion), ‘over a period of eight years’ by renegotiating trade deals and driving economic growth.
Economists dismissed the claim as arithmetically impossible at the time, and the newspaper’s fact-checker awarded it the maximum four-Pinocchio rating.
