FLASHBACK: Trump said he was ‘king of debt,’ would eliminate it in 8 years

When Donald Trump ran for president for the first time, he campaigned on reducing the national debt, referring to himself at the time as “the king of debt” and telling voters he would pay off the nation’s multi-trillion-dollar debt in 8 years.   

“I’m the king of debt. I’m great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me,” Trump said during an interview with CBS’s Norah O’Donnell in the lead up to the 2016 election. “I’ve made a fortune by using debt, and if things don’t work out I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that’s a smart thing, not a stupid thing.” 

“We’ve got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt,” Trump said a few months prior on the campaign trail during an interview with The Washington Post. When asked how long it would take, Trump responded: “I would say over a period of eight years … The power is trade. Our deals are so bad.” 

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The nation’s ever-rising debt is once again a focus for Trump, as GOP defectors over his “big, beautiful bill,” have largely staked their concerns around arguments that the Republican Party’s new spending package will increase the national debt and deficit too much, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating it will add roughly $3 trillion over the next decade.

The debt currently stands at more than $36.2 trillion according to Fox Business’ U.S. National Debt Tracker.

Elon Musk, who has cemented his stance in recent days against the Trump-endorsed spending package – leading to a highly-publicized feud between the two leaders – has argued that bill “undermines” the work he did while leading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) because it does not cut spending enough.

“This immense level of overspending will drive America into debt slavery!” Musk declared early on Wednesday in a post on X, shortly after he called the bill a “disgusting abomination.”

In this December 2024 photo, two women walk past a bus stop where there is a National Debt Clock billboard display showing the United States gross national debt and each American family’s share of the debt in Washington, D.C. (ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

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Shortly thereafter, Musk referenced an X post from GOP Utah Sen. Mike Lee, which argued that “the accrued interest on the national debt now exceeds $1 trillion a year.” This is more than the country spends on defense annually, Lee’s post added. “And yet Congress continues to add to the debt at an astounding rate of $2 trillion per year—with our national debt growing faster than our economy.”

In another X post from Musk, in the lead up to his feud with Trump this week, he succinctly described the U.S.’s $36.2 trillion debt as “scary.”  

Even before the highly publicized feud between Musk and Trump over the contentious GOP spending package, Musk called the rising national debt “terrifying” and lamented “America is headed for de facto bankruptcy very fast.” 

Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, wears a homemade national debt clock pin on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023. Massie is one of two House GOP defectors on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” over what it will do to the national debt and deficit. (Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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“President Trump is the first president in modern history to seriously tackle the waste, fraud, and abuse in our bloated government. He has already trimmed billions in astonishingly mindless government spending across the administration, and now he is spearheading The One, Big, Beautiful Bill – which will be the largest deficit reduction in decades,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said to Fox News Digital in a statement Friday afternoon.