When Donald Trump gave an in-flight press conference en route to the Super Bowl last week, it generated a flurry of news, from the fresh threat of steel tariffs to the declaration of “Gulf of America Day”.
Much less remarked upon was a throwaway comment about the US’s financial obligations, which underlined the fact that tariffs are far from the only way in which Trump is jeopardising economic stability.
“We’re even looking at Treasuries,” the president told reporters. “There could be a problem … It could be that a lot of those things don’t count. In other words, that some of that stuff that we’re finding is very fraudulent, therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought.”
The suggestion was that opening up the US Treasury’s data to Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” team had identified a money-saving wheeze: why not walk away from some of America’s debt obligations – a “selective…
