President Donald Trump once warned against a huge “time bomb” facing the country while he raged on the 2016 campaign trail, but according to a new piece from The Hill, he now seems content to completely ignore it.
Writing for the outlet on Sunday, legal scholar David Wippman and historian Glenn C. Altschuler noted that Republicans have been fussing about the national debt for decades, harkening back to warnings from Ronald Reagan in 1981 when it surpassed $1 trillion for the first time. They also noted that Trump himself said that the U.S. was “sitting on a time bomb” of debt when he first ran for president, pledging that he would eliminate it within eight years.
As he reaches the halfway point of his second term a decade later, he has come nowhere close to that lofty promise, with the debt hitting the $40 trillion milestone last month. In fact, Wippman and Altschuler explained, he is doing considerable work to worsen the debt severely.
“Since January 2025, the debt has gone up almost $4 trillion,” the pair explained. “Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add an additional $4.7 trillion. Earlier this month, Trump promised $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans retain control of Congress in the midterm elections. With a price tag of $1.2 trillion, the ‘Trump dividend,’ he indicated, would be funded by ‘the tremendous economic success’ of the U.S., which ‘is making so much money’ from tariffs.”
The pair noted further that the vast majority of Americans, 98 percent per a recent poll, share Trump’s disinterest and said that the national debt is not one of the biggest issues threatening the country right now.
“Many more might do so if they realized that America’s spendthrift ways are hitting them hard, right now,” the pair added. “The national debt isn’t the only — or even the main — factor determining interest rates. But increases place upward pressure on interest rates, in part because the government must offer higher returns on government bonds to attract investors. Even small increases matter. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that a 0.55 percent increase in mortgage rates would increase payments on a $500,000 mortgage by almost $200 a month, and the lifetime cost of the loan by $64,000.”
They added later: “Nonetheless, politicians continue to kick the can down the road. Nor has the national debt received much attention in the 2026 midterms. Despite his 2016 ‘time bomb’ warning, Trump seems to have lost interest in reducing, let alone eliminating, our national debt. Asked whether he was concerned about rising interest rates, the president replied, ‘I don’t think so at all.'”