The MAGA Debt Bomb

How Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Turns America’s Fiscal Crisis Into a Weapon for Authoritarian Looting

A simple myth sold Americans the idea that Republicans, particularly under Donald Trump, were the party of “fiscal responsibility.” But as Goldman Sachs just made uncomfortably clear, and as independent observers have been warning for nearly two decades, this entire narrative has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.

The U.S. national debt has already reached $36 trillion, roughly 120% of GDP, a ratio not seen since the emergency mobilizations of World War II. But unlike WWII, which ended with a postwar boom, today’s debt spiral feeds primarily the billionaire class and foreign creditors like China, while stripping wealth from working Americans.

Goldman’s warning is blunt: Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” does nothing to alter the unsustainable debt trajectory. It actually worsens it. Even after accounting for tariffs and gimmicky “gold visa” revenue streams, the Republican plan will increase the deficit by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade before interest payments. Once you factor in rising borrowing costs, now projected to reach $1 trillion in annual interest payments, surpassing Medicare and defense, the fiscal math collapses entirely.

And yet Trump’s solution is more of the same: extend his 2017 tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, add new tax loopholes, slash revenue collections, all while increasing military spending and gutting domestic social programs. Rather than fiscal conservatism, it’s looting.

The foreign creditor piece is key. MAGA simultaneously rages against Chinese influence while handing Beijing ever more leverage as a primary holder of U.S. debt. Every additional trillion in debt service flows into foreign coffers, even as Trump uses Chinese interference rhetoric to whip his base into a frenzy.

Meanwhile, Trump’s team spins it as “growth,” promising that magical future GDP gains will somehow make the debt disappear. Goldman warns if rates rise further, stabilizing debt-to-GDP will eventually require sustained fiscal surpluses of a size “seldom sustained historically.” Translation: at some point, austerity would have to become so brutal that it could collapse GDP itself, a self-defeating spiral familiar to anyone who studied Greece, Argentina, or, yes, Weimar Germany.

This is exactly the dynamic independent analysts like UNFTR has been tracking: the artificial inflation of asset bubbles through QE, debt-driven speculation, and predatory consolidation has created a parasitic financial sector that requires ever more public borrowing just to keep the illusion of prosperity afloat. But that leverage comes at enormous cost. As the interest burden crowds out social spending, the very programs Trump now proposes slashing will be the first to fall, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food assistance, public pensions.

The trap is brilliant in its cruelty: wreck the fiscal house, then use the crisis to justify permanent austerity while the billionaire class, private equity funds, and monopolists harvest what’s left of the state.

What’s especially chilling is that the so-called grownups at Goldman Sachs, the CBO, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget are now openly warning about precisely this collapse scenario, yet within MAGA world, it’s all hand-waving, reality TV, and gold card visa sales.

Here’s the final point. Trump’s cognitive and moral deterioration is accelerating at precisely the moment these stakes reach maximum danger. A man who openly mixes slurred rambling about “license plates from China” with billion-dollar budget negotiations is not steering the U.S. toward stability. He is hollowing out its foundations on behalf of the financial and political predators feeding off his regime.

We are in the fiscal death spiral of late-stage authoritarian capitalism, happening in real time.