Donald Trump can claim another record for his legacy: he’s the president who presided over the largest US federal annual deficit in history.
According to data released jointly by the White House and the Treasury Department, the US annual deficit for fiscal year 2020, which ended September 30th, tripled to $3.1 trillion, the Washington Post reports.
Since Trump took office in 2017, he’s overseen a five-fold increase in the annual deficit, which was $660 billion in President Barack Obama’s last year in office.
While much of the spike in the deficit is attributable to the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has raised deficits each of the three years he’s been in office, with the FY 2019 deficit topping $1 trillion.
The strategy of increasing annual deficit seems contrary to Trump’s 2016 campaign promise that he would eliminate the entire federal debt in eight years. Currently, the federal debt stands at $27 trillion, an increase of more than $7 trillion since Trump’s taken office.