When Donald Trump ran for president for the first time, he campaigned on reducing the national debt, referring to himself at the time as "the king of debt" and telling voters he would pay off the nation's multi-trillion-dollar debt in 8 years. (GETTY IMAGES/DONALD J. TRUMP)
The nation's ever-rising debt is once again a focus for Trump, as GOP defectors over his "big, beautiful bill," have largely staked their concerns around arguments that the Republican Party's new spending package will increase the national debt and deficit too much, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating it will add roughly $3 trillion over the next decade.
The debt currently stands at more than $36.2 trillion according to Fox Business' U.S. National Debt Tracker.
Elon Musk, who has cemented his stance in recent days against the Trump-endorsed spending package – leading to a highly-publicized feud between the two leaders – has argued that bill "undermines" the work he did while leading the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) because it does not cut spending enough.
"This immense level of overspending will drive America into debt slavery!" Musk declared early on Wednesday in a post on X, shortly after he called the bill a "disgusting abomination."
Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, wears a homemade national debt clock pin on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023. Massie is one of two House GOP defectors on Trump's "big, beautiful bill" over what it will do to the national debt and deficit. (Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
"President Trump is the first president in modern history to seriously tackle the waste, fraud, and abuse in our bloated government. He has already trimmed billions in astonishingly mindless government spending across the administration, and now he is spearheading The One, Big, Beautiful Bill – which will be the largest deficit reduction in decades," White House spokesman Kush Desai said to Fox News Digital in a statement Friday afternoon.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/flashback-trump-ran-being-king-debt-2016-bragged-he-could-eliminate-national-debt-8-years