Donald Trump’s Imaginary History of the National Debt
The President of the United States is frighteningly disconnected from reality, and appears to be conducting a series of reckless trade wars based on hallucinations.
When our Country had no debt and built everything from Highways to the Military with CASH, we had a big system of Tariffs. Now we allow other countries to steal our wealth, treasure, and jobs - But no more! The USA is doing great, with unlimited upside into the future!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 23, 2019
It takes only a minute of simple research to find out that this entire tweet is wrong, even the words “and” and “the.”
In reality, the United States has carried a national debt since its very first days as a country, except for one year, 1835, when Andrew Jackson paid the entire debt by selling off massive amounts of Western land and vetoing public infrastructure projects like a national highway system. By January 1836, the US was carrying a debt again and it has never gone away.
President Eisenhower paid for the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 without increasing the debt by imposing gas and vehicle taxes, but in that year the national debt stood at $273 billion.
And just to top off this Trumpist layer cake of fantasy history, it should also be noted that Trump’s enormous tax cuts for the super-rich have added more than two trillion dollars to the national debt. That’s “trillion” with a T, as in Trump.