Younger readers might find this difficult to believe, but in the not-too-distant past, Republicans treated the budget deficit as one of the single most important crises facing the United States. The gap between what the government spends and what it takes in, GOP officials said, threatened to bankrupt the nation, crash the economy and ruin the lives of our children and grandchildren.

It was awfully tough to take the rhetoric seriously — that Republicans only seemed to care about the issue when there was a Democratic White House was a big hint about their lack of sincerity — but the GOP emphasis on “fiscal responsibility” has dominated the party’s focus for years.

This came to mind reading the latest CNBC report on the surging budget deficit.

The U.S. budget deficit soared to its highest monthly level in more than five years amid a surge in Medicare costs and as interest on the federal debt continued to weigh on the nation’s fiscal picture, the Treasury Department reported Wednesday.

In addition to the big single-month jump, the collective red ink across the first 10 months of the government’s fiscal year rose to nearly $1.8 trillion and surpassed the same period in 2025.

The budget shortfall in July was more than $432 billion, which was up roughly 48% from the same period a year ago and is the largest monthly deficit in more than five years. What’s more, the overall deficit for this year is already higher than all of last year’s — and that’s with two months still remaining in the fiscal year.

At this point, we could talk about the historical pattern over the past several decades, when budget deficits have grown by massive amounts under every Republican administration (Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2 and Trump), while shrinking under every Democratic administration (Clinton, Obama and Biden), despite the conventional wisdom about the GOP being the party of fiscal responsibility.

We could also talk about how the latest data went largely ignored by Republicans and their allies, including the Obama-era voices who warned that the sky was falling, a point that offers a timely reminder about the countless GOP voices who no longer feel the need to pretend the party cares about deficit reduction.

While we’re at it, we could even spend some time talking about how deficit reduction is no longer a Republican priority at all — it was, for example, entirely ignored in the latest White House budget proposal — as GOP policymakers focus instead on massive tax breaks (which make the debt worse) and massive increases in defense spending (which also make the debt worse).

But one dimension to the larger story often goes overlooked: Donald Trump’s campaign promises.

In February 2016, the candidate appeared on Fox News and assured viewers that if he were president, he could start paying off the national debt “so easily.” The Republican argued at the time that it would simply be a matter of looking at the country as “a profit-making corporation” instead of “a losing corporation.”

A month later, Trump declared at a debate that he could cut trillions of dollars in spending by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse.” Asked for a specific example, he said, “We’re cutting Common Core.” (Common Core is an education curriculum, which costs the federal government effectively nothing.)

A month after that, in April 2016, Trump declared that he was confident he could “get rid of” the entire multitrillion-dollar debt “fairly quickly.” Pressed for more specifics, the future president replied, “Well, I would say over a period of eight years.”

By July 2018, he boasted that once his economic agenda was in place, “we’ll start paying off that debt like water.”

Once in office, deficits predictably exploded as a direct result of the Republican’s policies. By the end of his first term, Trump had added nearly $7.8 trillion to the national debt in just one term, and most of that total was racked up before the Covid crisis.

Nevertheless, when he returned to the campaign trail ahead of the 2024 race, Trump apparently felt comfortable trying to pull the same trick twice, telling voters, “We’re going to pay off … the $35 trillion in debt. We’re going to pay it off. We’re going to get it done fast, too.”

The president returned to power and added an additional $1.78 trillion to the debt during the first year of his second term, and the second year of his second term is poised to be quite a bit worse.

If recent history is any guide, voters will eventually elect another Democratic president, at which point Republicans will again pretend to care about the nation’s fiscal health. But when that happens, there will be no reason to take the GOP’s claims seriously.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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