If there is such a thing as a silver lining to the predictable, entirely-avoidable disaster of CNN’s town hall with Donald Trump, it is that he laid bare—as he always does—the cynical void at the center of the GOP. For months, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his cast of far-right allies have been performing a principled stand on the debt ceiling, insisting that they are responsible, good-faith actors who have been jerked around by President Joe Biden—putting the nation’s economic security into jeopardy. But with one exchange Wednesday night, Trump pulled back the curtain on the whole production and put the farce of his party’s debt ceiling standoff on full display.
Asked by Kaitlan Collins about the prospect that the GOP’s insistence on extreme spending cuts could lead to an unprecedented default in a matter of weeks, the former president and current frontrunner for the Republican nomination not only downplayed the dangerous scenario as “psychological more than anything else,” but openly welcomed it. “We might as well do it now, because you’ll do it later,” Trump said. “Because we have to save this country.” Trump, of course, was not always so cavalier about the prospect of a default; as Collins pointed out, he had said during his presidency that using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge “could not happen.”
“Sure,” Trump said, smirking. “That’s when I was president.”
“So why is it different now that you’re out of office?”
“Because now I’m not president,” Trump replied, to approving laughter from a home crowd of Republican supporters.
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It was hardly the most outrageous thing Trump said during CNN’s primetime misadventure, which gave the twice-impeached former president a mainstream platform to broadcast his familiar lies, taunts, and pretensions for an interminable hour. But it was perhaps the clearest distillation of his and his party’s utter nihilism.
For much of this standoff, McCarthy and his new House majority had pressed Biden to accede to their demands in order to raise the borrowing limit—even as they failed to name what those demands were. When Biden made clear that he would not do their work for them, they reached down into their ideological oblivion and finally pulled out a budget, the murkiness of which failed to mask its extremity and impracticability. “This bill is vague by design,” Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a White House analysis of the GOP plan in April, noting that it will “force devastating cuts that will hurt millions of people, damage our economy, and undermine our national security.” But McCarthy—with the support of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—dug his heels in as negotiations with the White House resumed this week, despite Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s warning that a default could come as soon as next month. “I would hope that he would be willing to negotiate for the next two weeks so we can actually solve this problem,” McCarthy said after meeting with Biden Tuesday, “and not take America [to] the brink.”
Republicans could immediately pull the country back from the cliff’s edge by raising the debt limit without conditioning it on spending cuts, just as they did three times under Trump. But the people running the GOP don’t want to, because they seem to view this all as a political game, as Trump himself clearly does. “If they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re gonna have to do a default,” Trump told Republicans from the town hall stage Wednesday. “The Democrats will absolutely cave,” he predicted, but if they don’t, a default would be “better than what we’re doing right now, because we’re spending money like drunken sailors.”
“It could be really bad,” Trump allowed. “It could be maybe nothing. Maybe it’s a bad week, or a bad day—who knows?”
But this is obviously not a game, even if Trump has managed to convince some of his supporters that it is. A US default would trigger an “economic catastrophe,” as Yellen warned recently, which would likely result in millions of lost jobs and other devastating impacts for everyday Americans—including, presumably, the ones who lapped up Trump’s wisecracks Wednesday night. That he was given such a massive platform to spout this nonsense is beyond reckless on the part of CNN. But this reboot of the Trump Show should also be a reminder—for the millions of Americans who have had the pleasure of mostly ignoring him for the last two years—of the disastrousness of his term and the great danger another would bring. “Do you,” Biden tweeted after Trump’s tear through CNN, “want four more years of that?”
Eric Lutz
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