The “Morning Joe” team slammed the majority GOP-led House of Representatives after speaker Mike Johnson claimed they’ve done well to remain fiscally frugal, even though the party may have actually helped increase the country’s debt by $20 million.
“I’m a fiscal hawk — many of my Republican colleagues in the House feel the same way,” Speaker Mike Johnson said during an appearance on NBC’s interview and public affairs program, “Meet the Press. “But, we didn’t get in this situation overnight. It took us decades, many decades of Congress’, frankly, mismanagement of the public fisc to get into this situation and the last four years of the Biden administration increased spending dramatically, so it’s going to take us a while to get out of it.”
After the video stopped, that’s when host Joe Scarborough laid into Johnson and his red team, detailing why he thinks the nation’s financial woes are mostly Trump’s doing.
“I just want to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt here … In fact, maybe he doesn’t know current events, because if he did, he would know that actually, 20 years ago or so, Congress balanced the budget four years in a row,” Scarborough said. “And over the past eight years, the Trump administration, the first time, passed the largest deficits, the biggest debt, the biggest budgets in history up to that point. Donald Trump’s administration and the Republicans in the House of Representatives. Maybe, I don’t know, Mike Johnson wasn’t paying attention back then, but they increased the national debt more in four years than every other president had in the history of the country accumulatively.”
Per Fiscaldate.treasury.gov, the United States is $36.22 trillion in debt. The website explains that there are two major categories for debt: debt held by the public (all debt held by individuals, corporations, state or local governments, etc.) and intergovernmental holdings (trust funds, Social Security, Medicare, etc.). The debt held by the public has increased by 121% since 2015, while the other increased by 44% since 2015, the site notes.
Though he promised to cut spending as part of his return to the White House, Trump has spent $200 billion more in his first 100 days than compared to last year, per reports. Time magazine also reported that his recent “big, beautiful” tax and spending bill would add more than $2.5 trillion to federal debt over the next decade, despite White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stating that the bill would save the government $1.6 trillion.
“This bill does not add to the deficit,” Leavitt previously told reporters. “It is the largest savings for any legislation that has ever passed Capitol Hill in our nation’s history.”
“When somebody says something that’s so misleading, it’s very, very important that people know,” Scarborough further noted on Monday. “Mike Johnson is desperately working to pass a budget that will increase the national debt by $20 trillion over the next 10 years. Do you realize this country didn’t even accumulate that much debt over its first 220 years of existence, combined together? From George Washington through [Barack] Obama? Think about this … And he says he’s fiscally conservative? No, he’s not.” Check out the full clip above.
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