Trump’s Budget Fantasy

“BALANCED BUDGET!!! DJT” Donald Trump posted that promise on February 7, 2025, the 18th day of his current presidential term.

During the 2024 campaign, he had promised even more: the elimination of the entire national debt in a single term of office.

Trump insisted that he could reach his budget goals without disagreeable spending cuts.

At a rally in St.

Cloud, Minnesota, in July 2024, Trump pledged to make “not one penny” in cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

He repeated that “not one penny” promise countless times through 2024, including in the Republican platform .

Instead, he proposed eliminating deficits and debt with magic money from growth, from crypto, and—above all—from tariffs.

Tariffs would generate so much revenue that they might replace the income tax, maybe even finance a $2,000 dividend for every American taxpayer.

Basic budget math contradicted Trump’s fantasies.

The United States imported about $3.3 trillion in goods in 2024.

The budget deficit for that year was about $1.8 trillion .

To imagine that tariffs could eliminate the budget deficit required believing that the Trump administration would impose a 55 percent tariff on all imports—including oil, natural gas, and electricity—and that consumers would pay this tariff without altering their buying behavior at all.

That was all obviously absurd. [ Martha Gimbel: Americans are already paying dearly for the national debt ] But there was a Plan B to balance the budget! Let Elon Musk do it! At a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden in October 2024, Musk boasted that he could save $2 trillion in wasteful spending.

That was the genesis of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s guerrilla war against the U.S. government.