So everyone is having fun with Donald Trump’s suggestion that he’ll negotiate forgiveness on U.S. debt — making America great by running it like a failing Atlantic City casino. (By the way, I think I may have been one of the first to come up with that analogy, although probably many people did so independently.)

A number of people have also pointed out that willingness to trifle with the full faith and credit of the U.S. government didn’t start with Trump — it started with Republicans in the House, who casually tried to extort concessions by refusing to raise the debt limit.

But one thing I haven’t seen much discussion of is the question of why Trump imagines that we have a severe debt problem, requiring extraordinary measures. Here, after all, is what U.S. interest payments look like:

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See the crisis? Neither do I.

But Trump, we can assume, doesn’t look at economic data, or for that matter employ anyone who can. Remember how unemployment is really 42 percent? What he does do is pick up stuff that everyone around him says.

And here’s the thing: claims that America is facing a debt crisis have been all over the political landscape for years, in defiance of both the actual debt service numbers and the verdict of the market, which wants to lend us money for almost nothing. Paul Ryan loved to talk about a “looming debt crisis“, requiring that we move immediately to privatize Medicare and, uh, cut taxes on the rich. Various heads of the Peterson hydra, like Fix the Debt, convinced much of the political elite that debt is the number one problem facing America.

So it’s not really surprising that Trump, who doesn’t know much about policy, would pick up on all this buzz, and not get the memo that it’s all really about finding excuses to slash social programs. And he knows, or thinks he knows, a lot about being overextended on credit; so let’s declare bankruptcy and make a deal!

The point is that this isn’t coming solely from the would-be ignoramus-in-chief; he’s channeling nonsense that took over a large part of supposedly serious policy discourse not long ago.