Trump's chief of staff says Republicans only care about deficits when a Democrat is president

President Donald Trump's acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who was formerly the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, pointed out the hypocrisy of the Republican Party when it comes to the deficit, The Washington Post reported.

In a Wednesday night speech at the Oxford Union, Mulvaney said Republicans take a very different tone on the budget when a Democrat is president than they do when a Republican is in the White House.

What did he say?

"My party is very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House," Mulvaney said, according to the Post. "The worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the president. Then Donald Trump became president, and we're a lot less interested as a party."

Mulvaney also said that although he finds the deficit, which reached $1 trillion in 2019, "extraordinarily disturbing," Republicans don't care about it, and neither do voters.

Is he correct?

In 2011, a group of 23 Republican senators wrote a letter to then-President Barack Obama, urging him to address the rising deficit.

"Government spending is growing at an alarming rate, and the federal budget deficit has reached record levels," the group of senators wrote to Obama. "Congress will soon face a vote to increase the debt ceiling yet again, the fourth time in your Presidency and the 11th time in the last decade. Future generations will drown in debt forced onto them by the inactions of Congresses and Administrations far before their time. The time to remedy these failures is now."

In 2019, as it turns out, 23 Republican senators (although not all the same ones) voted against a budget deal supported by President Trump, citing concerns that it did not address the deficit problem.

However, those 23 senators also either voted in favor of the president's tax cuts or publicly supported them while they weren't yet in Congress. Although the tax cuts have helped create a strong economy, they come at the cost of a likely shortfall of $1 trillion or more over the 10 years following adoption of the tax law.