If the remaining 46 months of Donald Trump’s resurrection resemble the first two, this administration will have a remarkably high ratio of theatrical action to substantial achievement. And it will exacerbate the fiscal incontinence that is the nation’s foremost domestic crisis.
Trump is the taunter of Canada, coveter of Greenland, threatener of Panama, re-namer of the Gulf of Mexico, scourge of paper straws and demander that Major League Baseball “get off its fat, lazy ass” and enshrine Pete Rose in Cooperstown. He fulminates about everything. (Does he even know for what he promises to pardon Rose? Tax evasion, not betting on baseball.)
The in-your-face-all-the-time trophy goes, however, to Trump’s apprentice. The black-clad, chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk is a master of the angry adolescent’s dress and of the now-presidential penchant for vulgarity. (“LITERALLY, F— YOUR OWN FACE!” Musk responded with a meme to an X user who annoyed him.)
In this fiscal year’s first five months, beginning Oct. 1, the government borrowed $1.1 trillion — almost $8 billion a day. In February, the first full month of the Musk’s government-pruning “revolution,” borrowing was $308 billion because spending was $40 billion more — a 7 percent increase — over February 2024.
This is not Musk’s fault. His “efficiency” crusade is a gnat nibbling at the elephantine government’s accelerating growth.
Much attention has been given to the U.S. Agency for International Development’s monthly outlays being cut last month from $547 million in February 2024 to $226 million. But, the Financial Times says, “a mere 3 percent rise in monthly healthcare spending” cost an additional $5 billion. And a 6 percent increase in Social Security outlays cost an additional $8 billion. And a $10 billion increase in the monthly cost of debt service brought the total for February alone to $86 billion.
Many of Musk’s DOGE firings, canceled grants and contracts, etc., are in the subjunctive mood, pending Congress’s awakening from its hibernation. And Musk’s theatricalities are impotent: Government spending will grow as long as baby boomers continue to retire, the population ages and Congress continues to enlarge the national debt with gargantuan budget deficits.
Debt service, says Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, is “the fastest growing budget line item.” It is larger than the Defense Department’s budget, larger than any expenditure other than Social Security. MacGuineas notes that House Republicans this month attached the debt ceiling increase “to a plan for more borrowing.”
Then there is the matter of Musk-proof Medicaid, the expansion of which was the largest consequence of the otherwise-not-very-consequential Barack Obama presidency. Created 60 years ago to cover poor parents and disabled people, it was expanded in 2010 by the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. Today, in almost all the 40 states that have embraced federally subsidized expansion, Medicaid is the largest budget item. Nine states have “trigger” laws that would automatically reverse their Medicaid expansion if the federal contribution were substantially diminished.
The Economist says Medicaid covers 72 million people, paying for 40 percent of births and 60 percent of nursing-home residents. Medicaid is an important reason the median portion of state revenue coming from federal sources is, according to Tony Woodlief of the Center for Practical Federalism, “39 percent and climbing.” Were the Musk-Trump administration to try cutting Medicaid, Congress might try to participate in government to protect this program.
But, then, why bother pretending to participate? Before Trump’s inauguration, Congress passed an anti-TikTok law meticulously specific about the timetable for TikTok’s being either sold or banned. Trump, however, issued an executive order instructing the attorney general to disregard the timetable. From the Republican-controlled Congress came its anthem, Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.”
The Constitution’s Article II says the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” . Trump says, “I have an Article II, where I have a right to do whatever I want as president.”
Trump lost in 2020 because voters, weary of a political diet consisting of huge dollops of turmoil smothered in a gravy of malice, thought Joe Biden promised tranquility. Trump won in 2024 partly because Biden whisperers convinced him that voters craved high-octane progressivism, from trillion-dollar spending tranches to innumerable pronouns.
In 2025, one party is prostrate before its Dear Leader, and the other is unembarrassed about pathetically waving a sign proclaiming “This is not normal.” This has become normal: In our two-party system, when one party drives itself into a ditch, the other swerves into the opposite one.
George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.
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