On Wednesday, the national debt passed $40 trillion for the first time.

That is about $117,000 for every person in this country. About $297,000 for every household. It is roughly the size of the economies of China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and India put together.

When Donald Trump was sworn in the first time in January 2017, the number was $19.95 trillion. It has doubled since.

He said he would pay it off

Ten years ago this spring, Trump told the country he was going to erase the whole thing.

Reason magazine went back and checked the tape on the tenth anniversary. In a March 31, 2016 interview with The Washington Post, Trump said this:

"We're not a rich country. We're a debtor nation. We've got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt."

The Post's Bob Woodward asked him how long that would take. "Fairly quickly," Trump said. Pressed for a real answer, he gave one:

"Well, I would say over a period of eight years."

Eight years came and went. The debt did not go down. It doubled.

What the second term has actually done

Since Trump took office again in January 2025, the debt has grown by $3.8 trillion — in nineteen months. Across both of his terms it has grown by $11.6 trillion. (For the record, it grew $8.4 trillion under Joe Biden, who never promised to erase it.)

The yearly numbers are worse than the totals suggest:

• The government ran a $1.8 trillion deficit in the budget year that ended last September. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group that yells at both parties, put it plainly: "The federal government continues to borrow $5 billion per day."
• This year is worse. Ten months in, we have already borrowed more than we borrowed in all of last year. The Congressional Budget Office now expects a $2.1 trillion deficit — $200 billion more than it thought in February.
• July alone was a $432 billion hole. That is the fourth-worst single month in American history.
• The group's president, Maya MacGuineas, updated her math this month: we are now borrowing "nearly $6 billion per day."

Interest on all that borrowing now costs more than $1 trillion a year. It is the second-biggest line in the entire federal budget — bigger than Medicare, bigger than the Pentagon. About a fifth of every tax dollar collected now goes to paying interest on money we already spent.

They were told the price. They voted for it anyway.

None of this was a surprise. The bill that did most of the damage was scored before anyone voted on it.

On July 3, 2025, House Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act 218 to 214. Trump signed it the next day. It extended his 2017 tax cuts, paid for part of them by cutting Medicaid and food aid, and raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion — the largest increase in American history.

The Congressional Budget Office scored it at $3.4 trillion in new debt over ten years. Republican leaders spent the spring telling everyone CBO was wrong.

While the bill was still moving, Speaker Mike Johnson went on CNN and called the deficit projections "dramatically overstated." He said the economy would grow fast enough to make them wrong. His exact words: "we're not buying it."

CBO has now run the numbers again — this time including the faster growth Johnson was counting on. The bill costs $4.7 trillion through 2035, or $4.2 trillion over the same ten-year window it first scored.

The estimate did not come down. It went up by about $800 billion.

We have seen this exact movie twice before

Here is the part that gets left out of the story most people have in their heads.

In 2017, when Republicans were selling the last round of tax cuts, they said the same thing they said in 2025. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told the country, "Not only will this tax plan pay for itself, but it will pay down debt." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the plan would "be revenue neutral for the government if not a revenue generator." Speaker Paul Ryan said they were "right there in the sweet spot."

The year after it passed, the deficit jumped 17 percent to $779 billion. Corporate tax collections fell 31 percent. CBO later figured the 2017 cuts would add about $1.8 trillion to deficits through 2028, before counting a dime of interest. The watchdog group's conclusion was four words long: "Tax cuts do not pay for themselves."

And it had all happened before that. As CNBC noted at the time, deficits also rose after the tax cuts under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Three Republican presidents, three big tax cuts, three sets of promises that the cuts would pay for themselves, three explosions of debt.

"The party of fiscal responsibility"

Republicans have run on being the careful ones with money for forty years. They spent the Obama years, as CNBC put it, relentlessly attacking him over deficits and debt. The actual record runs the other way, and it isn't close.

The A-Mark Foundation, a nonpartisan research group, lined up every president since 1981 and compared the deficit for their first budget to the deficit for their last one. Its finding, in its own words:

"The four Republican presidents since 1981 (Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump—who served one term) increased the federal deficit by 94%, 67%, 1,204% and 317%, respectively."

"In the two completed Democratic presidencies since 1981 (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama), the federal deficit decreased by 150% and 53%, respectively."

Four for four one way. Two for two the other.

PolitiFact checked a version of this claim in 2019 and rated it Mostly True, with a fair caveat: presidents don't control the economy, and recessions and wars land on whoever happens to be in office.

That caveat is real. So look at the thing presidents do control — the bills they sign. There, the pattern is even cleaner. Reagan cut taxes and deficits rose. Bush cut taxes and deficits rose. Trump cut taxes twice and deficits rose both times.

One more fact worth sitting with: the last time this country ran a surplus was 2001. It was Bill Clinton's last budget.

DOGE was supposed to fix this

Trump's answer to the debt in his second term was DOGE, a cost-cutting operation he handed the job of slashing the federal workforce.

Almost all of what it went after was "discretionary" spending — the smallest slice of the budget. Around 60 percent of the roughly $7 trillion the government spends each year goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans' care, which Trump promised not to touch. Another $1.1 trillion is interest.

The debt went up $3.8 trillion anyway.

What this costs you, personally

This is not an abstraction about a big number in Washington. It shows up in what you pay to borrow money.

The Budget Lab at Yale ran the math in March. Federal borrowing since 2015 has pushed long-term interest rates up about 97 basis points. For a family taking out a 30-year mortgage at today's median home price, that is about $2,500 more a year — roughly $76,000 over the life of the loan. A typical car loan costs about $120 more a year. A typical small business loan costs about $770 more.

Margaret Spellings, who runs the Bipartisan Policy Center, said it this way as the $40 trillion mark approached: "Federal debt is already raising the cost of living and choking out other spending and investment."

The debt hawks who voted for the debt

The tell isn't that Republicans borrowed money. Everybody borrows money. The tell is that they campaigned against borrowing right up until the vote.

• Aaron Bean founded the House DOGE Caucus in November 2024 because the debt had hit $36 trillion. He called it "a wakeup call." Then he voted for the bill. The caucus stopped meeting, DOGE expired, and the debt went up $3.9 trillion.
• Keith Self tells his constituents the national debt is "an existential threat to our Republic." He voted for the $3.4 trillion bill, then introduced a bill to stop bills like it.
• Steve Womack is Arkansas's designated grown-up on the debt — a former Budget Committee chairman who just introduced a bipartisan fix. His press release celebrating the $3.4 trillion bill runs about a thousand words and never mentions the deficit once.
• Tim Burchett said he'd vote no if the bill added to the deficit. The Senate sent back a version that added $1.7 trillion more. He went to the White House, got a souvenir signed by Trump, and voted yes the next day.

There is a name for a party that runs on cutting the debt and then doubles it, twice, using the same promise both times. It isn't fiscal responsibility.

Sources

• Al Jazeera and Reuters, "US national debt passes record $40 trillion," August 19, 2026. Photo: AFP.
• Eric Boehm, Reason, "10 Years Ago Today, Trump Promised To Eliminate the National Debt. Instead, It Has Doubled," March 31, 2026.