Inflating away $40 trillion in debt? The government intends to steal from you slowly enough that you won't notice until your savings are already gone.
Trump's statement reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what inflation actually is. Ludwig von Mises identified inflation as a tax. Every dollar the Federal Reserve creates without corresponding production transfers purchasing power from savers to the first spenders, which means the Treasury and its contractors eat well while your paycheck buys less. The debt doesn't disappear. The burden shifts onto you.
Let me break it down for you. The government borrows $40 trillion, which it cannot repay. So it instructs the central bank to create new money to service that debt. That new money causes prices to rise. Rising prices squeeze working Americans, who then demand more government support. The government borrows more to fund that support. The cycle tightens.
Weimar Germany tried this in 1923. Zimbabwe tried it in 2008, printing 100-trillion-dollar notes that couldn't buy bread. Argentina has repeated the experiment so many times it has become a case study in willful self-destruction.
Sound money advocates have made this argument for over a century: debt doesn't vanish through inflation; it gets redistributed. Creditors take losses. Retirees on fixed incomes get gutted. The politically connected, holding hard assets and equity, walk away intact.
What Trump describes is default by deception.