Biden has added twice as much national debt as Trump during first term

Treasury Department data show that President Joe Biden added twice as much to the national debt as his predecessor Donald Trump in the same time period of his first term.

The national debt is now $32.03 trillion, having increased about $4.3 trillion since Biden took office in January of 2021.

During the first two-and-a-half years of Trump's first term, the debt increased $2.1 trillion.

Biden had a Democrat House and Senate until January 2023, while Trump had a Republican House and Senate for his first two years in office.

While a $2.1 trillion increase is better than a $4.3 trillion one, these number show that both political parties have a spending problem, with Democrats just having a significantly bigger one.

Biden clearly used COVID as an excuse to blow out the spending, and Trump did his share of big spending in the early years of the pandemic, too. It will be interesting to see whether Trump's spending matches Biden's for the rest of this first term, when COVID was basically over for Biden but was only just beginning for Trump.