Has the national debt increased since Trump was president

1. The simple before-and-after: raw totals show growth

At the end of President Trump’s term the headline federal debt was roughly in the high-$20‑trillion range (about $28.1 trillion at the start of 2021 by commonly cited measures), and subsequent years saw the debt climb into the low‑to‑mid‑$30‑trillion range and beyond — for example, reporting in 2023–2024 records the debt near $31–35 trillion and later coverage cites roughly $38 trillion by 2025, indicating clear growth since Trump left office ^[1][3][4].

2. Different ways to measure “the debt” — why numbers diverge

Analysts distinguish gross federal debt, debt held by the public, and net measures that subtract intra-governmental holdings; the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) highlights that “debt held by the public” rose substantially during both Trump’s and Biden’s administrations and gives specific growth figures that differ from gross totals, which helps explain why some outlets report different dollar increases for each president ^[2][4].

3. What caused the post‑Trump increase: policy plus economics

Much of the jump after 2020 reflects laws and emergency spending tied to the COVID crisis (including the CARES Act and later the American Rescue Plan) and subsequent fiscal actions, with CRFB documenting major pieces of legislation and executive decisions that added to approved borrowing; analysts separate COVID-related borrowing from non‑COVID drivers to parse responsibility, but agree that both policy choices and macroeconomic factors pushed borrowing higher ^[5][2].

4. Political disputes over attribution and accounting

The magnitude and blame for post‑Trump debt growth became a partisan flashpoint: independent groups like CRFB quantify borrowing attributed to presidents and legislation, while the House Budget Committee challenged some of CRFB’s framing and offered counterclaims about what administration actions cost or saved, underlining that conclusions depend on methodology and which items (interest, executive actions, emergency bills) are counted ^[5][6].

5. Interest costs and the compounding problem

Beyond the headline debt total, rising interest rates and the size of the debt have pushed interest payments sharply higher, making servicing the debt a growing budget item; the House Budget Committee and reporting note that interest spending has climbed into the hundreds of billions annually and is projected to be a much larger share of the budget going forward, which amplifies the fiscal implications of any increase in total debt ^[6][7].

6. What the numbers do — and do not — prove about presidential responsibility

While the debt has increased since Trump left office, attributing growth solely to any one president is analytically fraught: presidents can propose budgets and sign laws, but Congress writes the spending and tax bills and unexpected events (pandemics, recessions, inflation and rate moves) force additional borrowing; CRFB and other trackers make apples‑to‑apples attempts to assign approved borrowing to administrations, but methodological choices change the headline assigned to each president ^[2][5][4].

7. Bottom line and reporting caveats

The bottom line is unambiguous on the core question: the national debt did increase after Trump’s presidency ended — by multiple measures and across several independent trackers — but the exact dollar amount and the share of growth attributable to specific policies or to broader economic events depend on the debt metric and methodological choices used by different analysts ^[1][2][5].