U.S. President Donald Trump (C) bangs a gavel after signing the "Big Beautiful Bill Act" at the White House in Washington, DC, on July 4, 2025.Two decades after then-Vice President Dick Cheney declared that deficits don’t matter, members of his own party appear intent on proving his theory, adding another massive, multi-trillion-dollar slab onto the national debt.Despite frequently expressing outrage about how much the country is borrowing to pay for basic operating costs, President Donald Trump and Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress voted to erode the tax base even further, increasing annual deficits and sending the federal debt to historic highs.Trump inherited a robust economy with low unemployment in 2017 and yet, with a big tax cut, began generating $1 trillion-a-year budget deficits. When the COVID pandemic hit in the final year of his term, shrinking tax revenues while simultaneously requiring massive federal spending to avert a recession, the combination left Trump adding $8 trillion to the debt in just four years.As he began his second term in January, the anticipated new debt already projected by the non-partisan Congressional Budge
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