Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough found they agree that congressional Republicans have worked with Democrats to raise the national debt.
Scarborough said Republicans have been “hypocritical” in cutting the deficit and balancing the budget despite repeated criticism of President Joe Biden’s administration for pushing big spending bills.
“The House Republicans, and all Republicans in Washington, we’ll just say Washington Republicans, have been hypocritical on the issue of balancing budgets, paying down the debts. Under Donald Trump, as I’m sure you know—” Scarborough began.
“Of course! Joe, of course!” DeSantis replied.
“The debt exploded in his [Trump’s] four years,” Scarborough continued.
“The last time Republicans did anything about it was when you were in Congress,” the Florida governor said. “That was the last time Republicans actually walked the walk.”
Scarborough, who served as a congressman from 1995 to 2001, said Congress balanced the budget four times during his time in office. The deficit soared under former President George W. Bush and former President Barack Obama’s administration and then became “worse than ever” during the Trump administration. (RELATED: DeSantis, GOP Senator Butt Heads Over Bailout Money)
“Why is it that Washington Republicans only care about the deficit when there’s a Democrat in the White House?” Scarborough asked.
“Well I think if you look at the unifying government under Bush and under Trump, Republican unified government, they threw out all the fiscal restraints,” DeSantis said. “That was not something people cared about, you talked about it at that time, it was like they didn’t want to hear it. The minute Republicans get out of power, now all of a sudden they beat their chest, they become fiscal hawks when it comes to all of this stuff.”
DeSantis cited the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the primary causes of the deficit spike during the Bush administration. He said Trump added over $7 trillion to the debt despite some congressional Republicans, including himself, urging the former president to refrain from signing high-cost spending bills into law.
“But he signed every spending bill that got to his desk, culminating in a big gusher of spending during his last year in office, which of course, ended up adding $7.8 trillion to the debt in one four-year period as the president. Under four years of Trump, he added almost as much to the debt as Obama did in eight years. So there was no sense of fiscal restraint there and so I make the point when I’m in Iowa and New Hampshire that this is both parties.”
Bush added $4 trillion to the national debt as the U.S. waged lengthy wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Investopedia. Obama added the most to the national debt in dollar amounts partly due to signing a $832 billion stimulus package to go toward mitigating the Great Recession and $858 billion in tax cuts.
Trump added $6.7 trillion to the debt between fiscal year 2017 and fiscal year 2020 largely related to the COVID pandemic, according to The Balance. He included a $966 billion deficit in his 2021 fiscal year budget, but the debt ended up growing by $1.5 trillion.
The deficit has continued to rise under Biden due to the large spending packages, including the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPs Act, being signed into law.