Donald Trump’s slogan in the 2024 US Presidential Election, just as it was in the 2020 and 2016 US Presidential elections, is “Make America Great Again”. There’s a reason he stole that slogan from Ronald Reagan, and that reason is that it is a very good one.
First, it’s an active statement. It implies that there is work to be done and a programme to be enacted. Second, it identifies a vague but undefinable problem: That the country is in decline, and has lost a sense of greatness. How exactly this has happened is not defined by the slogan, and is left up to the voter. Perhaps gay marriage is the problem; perhaps industrial decline; perhaps it’s school shootings. You can affix your own hobby horse to it and still agree with the general principle.
Third, there’s a simplicity to it because it tells the voters that to Make America Great Again, there’s only one thing that actually need be done – to cast a ballot for Donald Trump. After that, it’s up to him. It’s the great man theory of history in action: The voter doesn’t really need to worry all that much about policy, they need only place their faith in Caesar. Or Trump.
Of course, the United States is a country that is objectively in decline, and objectively has significant problems. It’s military and economic power is declining relative to the rest of the world, meaning that it is no longer a unipolar superpower. China is fast catching up. Decline is not necessarily a bad thing, if it is managed correctly: In the 20th century, the United Kingdom went from the world’s greatest economic and military power to about it’s sixth or seventh military and economic power. In the same timeframe, the living standards of UK citizens rose dramatically. That is not what is happening now, in the United States, which has several serious structural problems.
The biggest single problem is the budget. The United States owes its lenders, at this stage, some thirty five trillion US dollars. To put that in some context, Elon Musk was once reckoned to be the richest man on earth with a theoretical net worth of 200 billion US dollars. Were he willing to donate all of that to the United States, he would need to do it one hundred and seventy five more times to pay off what the United States owes.
The debt is growing, too, at an enormous rate. Interest payments alone now make up 2 billion dollars per day, or about the cost of one national Irish children’s hospital every thirty six hours. Just in interest on the US National Debt. By 2034, it is projected to eat up 23% of the US’s annual budget and become that country’s single biggest expense. One fifth of all taxes will go to just paying interest on the debt. Not paying back the debt.
It is reasonable then I think to ask what Donald Trump’s plan to fix this is.
In his first term, he pledged to eliminate the national debt in eight years. This, self-evidently, we can discount as typical bloviating nonsense that nobody was supposed to take seriously. In any case, he only had four years in power, and the fourth of those was disrupted by Covid. Trump’s lockdowns caused massive extra spending, which meant that rather than reducing the debt, his term in office saw it increase by 33%. In fact, in four years, Donald Trump borrowed more money than Barack Obama – an allegedly infamous spender – had managed in eight. George W. Bush, another allegedly unpatriotic President, increased the US national debt by 4 trillion dollars in eight years. Trump increased it by twice that amount in half the time.
Joe Biden, it should be said, has been no better. In his four years, he is on course to match Trump for unsustainable spending. Between the two administrations, the US national debt projection now looks like this:
The US, absent a course correction, is on course for an inevitable fiscal crisis.
So, what’s Donald Trump’s solution?
I ask, because yesterday he proposed another major and unfunded tax cut:
Trump just put this on Truth.
— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) July 31, 2024
I 100% AGREE! pic.twitter.com/zMvJyrIRKL
These are of course not the only tax cuts Trump has proposed. He wishes to exempt staff in hospitality from paying tax on tips. He wishes to enact further income tax cuts also. He intends to reduce the corporate tax.
Now John, some of you in the comments will say, he also intends to stop funding foreign wars.
Really?
In the first instance, the “funding foreign wars” line tends to be proof of the concept that people can’t meaningfully compare large numbers. The United States has provided, since the beginning of the war, about $45billion in aid to Ukraine. It also provides about 4 billion dollars annually in military aid to Israel. Stop those funds entirely – give not a single cent more to either country from tomorrow – and you would save three week’s worth of debt interest payments.
In the second instance, I promise you, Donald Trump will let you down on the “foreign wars” stuff, which is largely a fantasy of his base of supporters, and not something he has ever committed to, even once. In fact it might be noted that in terms of his record, he was more friendly to Israel than any President in recent history, and remains so in this campaign. So we can scratch that “foreign war” from the list of things he might defund.
This comes back to the single biggest problem with his candidacy, I think, which is that so many Trump supporters have fallen in love with Trump the meme rather than Trump the man. The meme Trump, the fantasy version, comes into office and negotiates peace in Ukraine on day one, and turns the US away from Israel. He crushes wokeness beneath his iron fists and bans all sorts of degeneracy. He restores economic greatness and forces the Chinese to grovel before him. But Trump the man – as his previous four years in office proves – does none of these things. That Trump appoints John Bolton as national security advisor, spends more in four years than any President in history, and presides over the rise of black lives matter while doing nothing about it other than tweeting.
If he wins, it’s Trump the man who you get. Which is why, I think, he gives rise to so many conspiracy theories: To cope with his failures, supporters must invent a fantasy world in which he’s actually playing “4d chess” and “great things are happening behind the scenes”. In its most extreme form, this becomes the Qanon conspiracy. In its more mild form, it’s the “Trump knows stuff you don’t” retort to any criticism.
Now, of course, there are ways to reduce the US’s debt burden. The United States is one of the very few western countries without a national Value Added Tax (VAT). Were one to be introduced at 5% (the Irish VAT is 23%) then that tax would raise $3trillion annually, or about 8.2billion per day. Enough to cover both the interest payments, and to pay down the principal amount on the debt.
Alternatively, the US could cut defence spending. Trump would do neither. Tax increases are anathema to Republicans, even when they make sense. Defence cuts are the kind of thing a Democrat would propose, and therefore would not get through Congress. In any case, the military and its associated industries are too important a source of votes and funding for Republican candidates for them to contemplate it.
Instead, the signs are that Trump would be just as bad, if not worse, on the debt in a second term as he was in the first, and Biden has been in his four years. The task of making America Great again is going to fall to somebody, and it is going to become more urgent. That person will not be Donald Trump, but the person whose job it finally becomes to clean up the debt mess that Trump and others are contributing to.
