‘Enormous problem’: Analyst fears Trump is spending $5.1T in imaginary cash
President Donald Trump bragged Wednesday that he brought back “$5.1 trillion” from the Middle East after his trip, but MSNBC producer Steve Benen is worried the cash is all in his imagination.
And, he worried, he’s already spending it.
Trump claimed, “So, I made that money in about two hours, the money that we’re talking about.”
In a Thursday column, Benen set out trying to find the cash.
Ignoring the plane from Qatar, Benen pointed out that Trump appears to love the figure “$5.1 trillion.” He uses it a lot.
“He referenced it a week ago when unveiling the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ report, which came two days after he pushed the same line during a visit to Capitol Hill, which came one day after he repeated the talking point at the White House,” wrote Benen, noting that last week Trump even suggested the sum could even be “$7 trillion.”
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To put that in context, $5.1 trillion is about one-sixth of the entire U.S. GDP.
A Washington Post fact-check said that Trump has recently begun claiming successes and foreign investments secured by President Joe Biden as his own. Trump’s fuzzy math includes Biden investments as well as those Trump had previously secured before the trip. Still, Trump maintained that “in about two hours,” he secured $5.1 trillion.
“The sum of the deals is under $1 trillion,” the report said.
The New York Times report did its own calculations, saying, “The value of the agreements appeared to total about $283 billion.”
Benen noted that even those investments “might not happen,” but even if they did, $283 billion is significantly lower than $5.1 trillion.
Some of that cash only “might materialize,” and if it does, it’ll be in “future decades,” said Paul Waldman in Public Notice, Benen cited.
Aside from the lies, Benen confessed that his concerns are that Trump appears to be already spending the money he claims he has collected.
Not only does his 2026 budget add to the deficit Republican lawmakers complain about, but Trump is also talking about spending it on his “Golden Dome” project.
“We can afford to do it,” he said. “You know, we took in $5.1 trillion in the last four days in the Middle East, and when you think about it, this is a tiny fraction of that.”
Benen closed by saying Trump didn’t take in $5.1 trillion. So it’s an “enormous problem” if he plans to spend it on “a missile shield project that won’t work.”
