I was flying cross-country Tuesday night and didn’t see Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address. The instant reviews were predictably mixed. Trump supporters, even reluctant ones, seemed to like it. His critics hated it.
I read it twice and mostly liked what was in there. The tribute to North Korean defector Ji Seong-ho was moving even on the page. But the most notable thing about the speech was actually what it left out.
Trump said nothing about the country’s $20 trillion debt crisis. Literally not a word. It was a long, long speech—80 minutes, counting applause breaks—but the president and his speechwriting team apparently couldn’t find any room for a mention of debt and the slow-motion crisis that is upon us.
Did they simply not think about it? Or did they deliberately exclude any talk of spending restraint and, most importantly, entitlement reform?
The only mention of “spending” was a reference to spending time. And the only reference to “deficits” came when the president invoked the “infrastructure deficit” he vowed to end with “at least $1.5 trillion for the new infrastructure investment we need.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Trump offered lip service about reducing the debt as a candidate but proudly opposed the entitlement reforms necessary to accomplish it. “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump told the Daily Signal a month before announcing his candidacy. “Every other Republican is going to cut, and even if they wouldn’t, they don’t know what to do because they don’t know where the money is. I do.”
At one point, he suggested that he had the answers if the U.S. economy collapsed under the weight of its debt. “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal,” Trump said in the spring of 2016.
His cluelessness was even more apparent during an October appearance with Sean Hannity, when Trump bizarrely claimed that gains in the stock market might wipe out the debt. “The country, we took it over and owed over 20 trillion. As you know the last eight years—they borrowed more than it did in the whole history of our country. So they borrowed more than $10 trillion. Right? And yet we picked up $5.2 trillion just in the stock market. Possibly picked up the whole thing in terms of the first nine months, in terms of value. So you can say, in one sense, we are really increasing values and maybe in a sense, we are reducing debt. We are very honored by it and very, very happy by what’s happening in Wall Street.”
Here’s what particularly striking about all of this. Nobody seems to care. My email inbox was full of statements praising Trump’s speech from many of the same Republicans who had shown genuine courage—something in short supply in Washington—from 2011-2016 by voting for serious entitlement reforms pushed by Paul Ryan and included in GOP budgets.
In congressional testimony in November, outgoing chairwoman of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen said: “I would simply say that I am very worried about the sustainability of the U.S. debt trajectory. Our current debt-to-GDP ratio of about 75 percent is not frightening but it’s also not low.” Yellen added: “It’s the type of thing that should keep people awake at night.”
These are the kinds of things that Republicans once believed—and once articulated. No longer?
Most of Donald Trump’s first State of the Union speech will be quickly forgotten, even the parts that most excited Republicans. What we’ll remember, I’m afraid, when we look back at $20 trillion in debt as an urgent but solvable problem, was the gaping hole at its center.
