The national debt just crossed $40 trillion, and somebody has to answer for it.
The media wants to spread the blame around. JD Vance isn’t playing along.
And what the Vice President told Newsmax about this debt crisis is going to leave Biden’s defenders with nothing to say.
Vance Names the Culprit
Vice President JD Vance blamed former President Joe Biden for the United States’ $40 trillion “debt bomb” and insisted the Trump administration inherited it.
“Even though the debt is too high, even though we inherited this debt bomb from the Biden administration, we actually do have a plan to get the economy growing faster than the debt,” Vance told Newsmax.
He pointed to the core problem: “The issue that we’ve had under the Biden administration and what we’re still kind of dealing with is that the debt was growing faster than American GDP. That’s the problem.” Vance added, “That’s something that we’re certainly fixing every single day in the Trump administration.”
That’s not spin. That’s a diagnosis. And it’s one the political class in Washington, DC spent four years refusing to deliver honestly.
Vance also said, “but even though the media doesn’t cover this, I’m glad you’re asking this question because [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent is very much on top of it.”
The media not covering it. That tracks. A $40 trillion debt that grew explosively under Democrat management doesn’t fit the narrative that Biden was some kind of fiscal moderate.
Bessent’s Argument for Growth Over Panic
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he believes the United States can “grow” out of the debt. “Well, I mean, look Sara, there’s nothing magic about the $40 trillion number, and we can grow our way out of that,” he told CNBC’s Sara Eisen.
That’s the right instinct. Governments don’t create wealth, they redistribute it, and the only real path out of a debt spiral is an economy generating more than the government can consume. Tax increases, the Left’s preferred solution, pull dollars out of the private economy and slow the very growth that could actually reduce the debt burden.
The $40 trillion milestone was recorded just five months after the country hit $39 trillion in March, and it reached $38 trillion five months before that, in October. The pace of accumulation alone tells the story. This isn’t a slow leak. It’s a gusher.
“It took 192 years to reach our first $1 trillion, but only five months to go from $39 trillion to $40 trillion,” said Margaret Spellings of the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Five months. Let that land for a second.
The Revisionist Push and Why It Falls Flat
The establishment press is already running its familiar playbook, spreading the debt across multiple administrations and implying that Trump bears as much responsibility as Biden. There’s a kernel of truth buried inside that framing, but it obscures more than it reveals.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a Washington, DC think tank, noted in June 2024 that “The national debt is on course to reach a record share of the economy under the next presidential administration, due in part to policies approved by Presidents Trump and Biden during their time in office, including executive actions and legislation passed by Congress.”
The same group reported Trump “approved $8.4 trillion of new ten-year borrowing during his full term in office, or $4.8 trillion excluding the CARES Act and other COVID relief” and Biden “approved $4.3 trillion of new ten-year borrowing, or $2.2 trillion excluding the American Rescue Plan” in his first three years.
Strip out the COVID emergency spending that both parties approved under extraordinary circumstances and the picture looks different. Biden’s non-emergency borrowing was not some unavoidable hangover from a pandemic. It was a choice, driven by infrastructure bills, green energy subsidies, and the kind of big-government expansion that Democrats have wanted to fund for decades. Calling it a “debt bomb” isn’t hyperbole. It’s accurate.
The media’s instinct to distribute blame equally between the two administrations is the same reflex that let Biden’s team run up the tab for four years without serious accountability. Vance isn’t letting that stand, and he’s right not to.
There’s also the question of what comes next. The Left’s answer to debt is always more taxes, which means more money extracted from working families, small business owners, and the investment activity that drives job creation. Every dollar Washington takes in taxes is a dollar no longer working in the private economy. That’s not a slogan. That’s arithmetic.
The Trump administration’s bet is that growth can outrun the debt. Bessent is making that case publicly. Vance is making it politically. And the alternative, letting the political class in Washington raise taxes and expand the programs that created this problem in the first place, would only accelerate the spiral.
But here’s the part nobody in the legacy press wants to say plainly: the debt didn’t hit $40 trillion because of some natural disaster or force of nature. It hit $40 trillion because Washington spent money it didn’t have, at a pace that accelerated sharply under Biden-era priorities. Vance named it. Bessent is working on it. The question is whether the rest of the political establishment has the stomach to actually do something about it, or whether they’ll spend the next two years debating whose fault it was while the number climbs toward $41 trillion.
And given Washington’s track record, the smart money isn’t on restraint.
Source: Mediaite, “JD Vance Says $40 Trillion U.S. ‘Debt Bomb’ is Biden’s Fault”