Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand how money works.
At least that’s one interpretation of the way he spends the nation’s precious resources with no regard for whether the country can afford his expenditures or not.
A less charitable explanation is that he DOES understand and just doesn’t CARE.
Oh, he gets the spending part, the fact that money can be exchanged for stuff, or to hire someone to do something you want done.
What he doesn’t seem to grasp is that one must HAVE sufficient money, or at least a reasonable expectation of GETTING enough money in time to cover what you’ll be paying out.
It’s called fiscal responsibility. And Trump doesn’t seem to have even heard of that concept, much less to BE fiscally responsible.
Right now he’s involved in numerous costly vanity projects, including the grand ballroom that nobody wanted except himself.
Remember when that ballroom was going to be paid for by private donations and would “only” cost $200 million?
And as everyone knows, in order to build it, he illegally demolished the east wing of the White House, which (as the very temporary occupant of that revered building) he had no authority to do.
The latest figure I’ve heard about the ballroom’s cost is $927 million, with more than half now coming from taxpayers (Sara Dorn, “Here’s How Much Trump’s Capital ‘Vanity Projects’ Will Cost—as Crews Prepare for Arch Groundbreaking,” Forbes, September 4, 2026.
When making his elaborate plans to do anything, he never seems to ask, “Would this be legal?” His only question, apparently, is “Can I get away with this?”
That ballroom is only one of several expensive monuments he plans. He also wants a 250-foot “triumphal” arch that would be taller (of course) than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
Cost of that monstrosity, which would be situated between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, is estimated at $100 million.
Opposition to construction of a Trump arch comes from military veterans and an architectural historian, who argue that it would block carefully planned views of historic buildings in that area of the nation’s capitol (Louis Casiano, “Lawyer says 250-foot Trump arch disrupts sightlines cherished by veterans seeking burial at Arlington,” Fox News, September 19, 2026).
We have already seen the costly mess he made of the reflecting pool near the Lincoln Memorial.
As for the gift airplane from Qatar that Trump was so hot to use as Air Force One (and then to keep at his presidential library after he leaves office)? After the taxpayers paid many millions to retrofit its capabilities—I’ve seen estimates as high as $1 billion—the plane still wasn’t considered safe enough to bring him home from a NATO summit in Turkey. He had to be spirited away to a different plane via a catering truck!
Taxpayers “would also be on the hook for $257 million in renovations to the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, which the president threatens to tear down unless he is allowed to slap his name on the side of the building” (Brad Reed, “’Trump Vanity Calculator’ Spotlights President’s Abuse of $1.8 Billion in Taxpayer Funds,” September 23, 2026, www. commondreams.org/news/ trump-vanity-projects-cost).
And I haven’t yet mentioned the stupid, illegal war with Iran that Trump has taken us into, one which he apparently has no idea how to get out of without looking weak and foolish.
But weak and foolish he is. That fact becomes more obvious each day.
There’s no telling how much the Iran war will cost us before it ends, whenever that may be. The worst loss, certainly, is the lives of the men and women killed during it. But the money cost is also bound to be astronomical.
How are we managing to pay for his profligate spending? Much of goes on the nation’s credit card, further ballooning our already bloated national debt.
As a sad reminder, the total of that debt recently passed FORTY TRILLION DOLLARS. That’s “trillion” with a “t.”
And Trump doesn’t even seem to understand, or care, what he does to this nation’s bottom line.