About a month ago, JD Vance appeared on a conservative podcast and assured the hosts and their listeners that the Trump administration is “serious” about reducing the budget deficit.

Like so much of what the vice president tells the public, his rhetoric was discredited by reality. The New York Times reported:

The United States budget deficit approached $2 trillion in the 2026 fiscal year, its highest level since the pandemic, as spending on the military, safety net programs and interest on the debt dwarfed the Trump administration’s cost cuts, Treasury Department figures showed on Friday.

The widening gap between what the government spends and what it collects in taxes and other revenue comes at a critical moment. Investors are nervous about America’s surging debt load, along with stubborn inflation, and have driven up borrowing costs.

Roughly three weeks after the end of the 2025-2026 fiscal year, the Treasury Department reported that the government spent $1.99 trillion more than it took in. That massive deficit reflected an increase of roughly $217 billion from a year earlier.

There’s no great mystery as to why this happened — among other things, Republicans approved massive tax breaks last year and began financing the war with Iran in late February — and there’s no reason to believe the nation’s fiscal health will improve anytime soon.

As the public considers the implications of this, here are a handful of things to keep in mind:

The economic circumstances suggest deficits this enormous shouldn’t happen. When the nation is facing a crisis, such as responding to a pandemic or an economic crash, it makes sense for the government to take on more debt. But there was no actual crisis during the last fiscal year, making the roughly $2 trillion annual deficit that much more difficult to defend.

The problem is getting worse faster than anyone expected. When the nation’s overall debt reached $40 trillion a couple of months ago, The Washington Post reported that we’re racking up debt faster than earlier independent analyses thanks almost entirely to the cost of GOP tax breaks, the war with Iran and the White House’s failed tariffs agenda. The article added, “The faster accumulation of debt comes at a perilous moment. An array of concerns, including inflation, the war in Iran and rising debt levels around the world, are driving investors to dump government bonds.”

Trump promised voters a very different outcome. As a candidate in 2016, the Republican told voters he had unique expertise in budgetary issues that would enable him to eliminate the deficit and start paying down the debt. Trump delivered the opposite results, adding nearly $7.8 trillion to the national debt in just one term, and most of that total was racked up before the Covid-19 crisis. As a candidate in 2024, he repeated his earlier promises, before again delivering the opposite results: Trump has added nearly $4 trillion in debt since returning to the White House early last year.

Eight years ago, Trump appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio show and reflected on the nation’s fiscal health. “We have $21 trillion in debt … a number that is unthinkable,” the president said in July 2018. “But that will go down very quickly.” Eight years later, the debt has nearly doubled.

Trump and congressional Republicans are to blame. For those concerned about the deficit and the debt, there’s no point in seeing this as a “both sides” issue. Republican policies made this happen.

Trump and congressional Republicans don’t seem to care. For decades, Republican officials have expressed hysterical concerns about “fiscal responsibility” every time there’s been a Democratic president. Indeed, 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 country. 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.

But as last year’s deficit nearly reached the $2 trillion mark, and the debt passes the $40 trillion mark, those same Republicans are silent on the issue.

Trump and congressional Republicans aren’t even pretending to have a plan to address this. It’s not as if the GOP has a bad plan to get the nation’s fiscal house in order; it’s that the party isn’t even trying to address the issue at all.

Earlier Republican warnings suddenly look ridiculous. Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, GOP officials said that if the national debt eclipsed the size of the overall economy, it would spell immediate doom. For the first time since World War II, the national debt has now eclipsed the size of the overall economy as Republicans pretend that the economy has reached its “golden age.”

Remember 1998? Around this time 28 years ago, Bill Clinton proudly declared that the deficit was officially gone, and record surpluses soon followed. At the time, the United States was on track to do the unthinkable: to pay off its national debt. Republican governance soon followed, which set us on a path to $40 trillion in debt.

The historical pattern is worth remembering. Despite the conventional wisdom about which party has credibility on fiscal issues, 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).

The next Democratic president needs to be prepared. Time will tell who prevails in the 2028 presidential election, but if it’s a Democrat, they need to understand that they’re inheriting a severe budgetary mess, which will be met by a new round of GOP hysterics about the mess that Republicans themselves created.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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