Just look at 2019. The president proposed a record-breaking $4.7 trillion budget. That’s how much he suggested the federal government spend in a single year. Since Trump took office, the US debt—much of which we owe to other countries that we borrow from—has grown by the trillions, to another all-time high of $22 trillion total. To pay off our debts today, according to one estimate, each taxpayer in the United States would need to fork over an average of $400,000. This should set off fiscal tornado sirens across America. We cannot keep borrowing money we can’t pay back, otherwise our children will owe a steep and terrible price.
The president also decided to throw the old spending limits out the window. He didn’t want to be holding a credit card that would easily max out. So in a deal cut with Nancy Pelosi, he effectively scrapped the conservatives’ treasured Budget Control Act and increased spending limits by more than $300 billion annually, adding another $2 trillion to America’s debt over the next decade. It’s difficult to capture the significance of this reversal. If President Obama had hatched a similar plan with a GOP House Speaker, Republicans would have been livid.
Conservatives should view this as complete and utter betrayal. Trump promised to do the opposite on federal spending. During the presidential campaign, he said he would eliminate America’s debt during his time in office. That’s right—eliminate it. How he was going to repay trillions in debt during such a short window was never fully explained. But that didn’t matter, because it wasn’t true. He said it to appease worried conservatives and to assure them that he was “one of them,” a budget hawk who wanted to cut spending. More “fake views.” Astoundingly, instead of a mutiny against President Trump, GOP congressmen whistled past the graveyard as they went to cast their votes on his disastrous budget deal, proving yet again that Trump has a Darth Vader chokehold on weak-willed Republicans.
Donald Trump has America back on the road to bankruptcy, an area where he has unparalleled expertise for a president of the United States. The small band of fiscal conservatives who remain in the Trump administration warned the president about the eventual dangers of his out-of-control spending addiction. In one such meeting, Trump reportedly said, “Yeah, but I won’t be here.” I never heard him say those words, but it doesn’t come as a surprise. That’s how he thinks. What does he care if the federal government goes belly-up? By then it won’t be his problem.
Trump also promised on the campaign trail to slash the bloated federal workforce. That, too, appears to have been a head fake. The number of government employees hasn’t shrunk much at all under Donald Trump. In fact, as of the second half of 2019, the federal workforce was on the rise again, to its largest levels since the end of the Obama administration. The president hasn’t made the issue a priority in his engagement with Congress, despite countless opportunities to bring it up in budget negotiations.
Trump has worked hard in the meantime to make the executive branch even more active, not less. While he’s cut regulations, he’s also issued a flurry of executive orders to bypass Congress and its elected representatives. Trump attacked Obama for doing the same, calling it “a basic disaster” and undemocratic. “We have a president that can’t get anything done so he just keeps signing executive orders all over the place,” he said. “Why is Barack Obama constantly issuing executive orders that are major power grabs of authority?” That was before Trump himself took office. Now he issues orders at a rate rivaling his Democratic predecessors. In his first three years, Bill Clinton issued 90 executive orders. In that same time period, Barack Obama issued 110. Donald Trump issued 120 before his third year was over.
The Trump administration is not a rewarding place for a fiscal conservative to work. Our attempts to get the president to care have mostly failed. Saving money is usually boring to him. When he gets interested in ending what he determines are wasteful programs—which for him are very specific initiatives like environmental projects he’s been told about or dollars sent to a country he’s angry with—he doesn’t understand why the initiatives cannot be stopped with a finger snap. People remind him again that it requires consistent attention and time. He has to work with Congress. But that’s too much effort. A few of us held out hope that as another election rolled around he’d get more interested in reducing spending and runaway agency budgets in order to satisfy conservatives. Instead he made a quick deal with Speaker Pelosi because it was easier and it gave him more cash. The callous trade was a tombstone placed atop our budget-balancing daydreams.
For a man who loves “big” things, Trump wanted his government the same way. This should not be a surprise.
Indefensible Defense
On defense and homeland security, the story appears better on the surface. The president has increased military spending (albeit at the cost of heaping piles of debt). He has focused on modernizing US forces and raising pay for our troops. And he has made securing the country and the border one of the highest priorities of his presidency.
In reality, Trump has been a disaster for the Pentagon. He refers to leaders of the military not as nonpartisan defenders of the republic, but as “his generals,” whom he can move around as he pleases, like knights on a chess board. It’s tough to listen to him talk like this. Some of these leaders have lost children in the defense of the nation. They have answered the knock at the door from men and women standing there to tell them the most heart-wrenching news a parent can hear, that their child is gone forever. Yet they are on the receiving end of orders barked by a man who cowered at the thought of military service. The patriots who are still in uniform will not come out and say it because they don’t want to openly disagree with their commander in chief, but many are appalled by Trump’s lack of decorum and his imprudent leadership of the armed forces.
Time and again, he has put our armed forces in a terrible position by trying to pull the military into political debates or using it to demonstrate his own toughness. This began before he entered office. As a candidate, Trump suggested the military and intelligence agencies embrace torture as a tactic against America’s enemies, vowing, “I would bring back waterboarding. And I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” Analysts pointed out that such statements are used by terrorists for propaganda, helping them recruit supporters by touting America’s supposed cruelty. It feeds their narrative, putting US forces in danger overseas. Fortunately, the president was persuaded to drop the subject early in his term by the incoming team, who realized Trump’s flip-flopping would impact national defense most of all.
The damage the president has done to our security is a consequence of his terrible foreign policy choices, an area where Trump’s instincts are so backward that we will devote an entire chapter to addressing them. For now, take Iran as an example. President Trump took office eager to meet face-to-face with Iran’s leaders, who run one of the most anti-American governments in the world. “Anytime they want,” he said. No preconditions. This is something a US president has never done, for good reason. Iran’s government has the blood of American soldiers on its hands. They are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Giving them an audience with the leader of the free world would put them on equal footing and be priceless media fodder for their use back home. It would also demonstrate to Iranian dissidents that America was embracing the brutal regime, not opposing it. Donald Trump didn’t understand or care about any of that, and military leaders’ stomachs churned at the president’s offer.