Once upon a time—as in, prior to January 20, 2017— any Democrat to utter the phrase “domestic spending” was immediately silenced by a Greek chorus of G.O.P. lawmakers squawking about the deficit. In 2009, when the Senate passed a $787 billion economic stimulus measure to combat the financial crisis, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called the vote “one of the most expensive . . . in history,” and added, “Americans are wondering how we’re going to pay for all this”; not a single House Republican voted for the measure. Eight years later, Donald Trump’s Republican party voted in favor of a far more expensive measure: the deficit-busting tax bill, which, despite Senator Bob Corker’s feeble protests, is expected to add anywhere between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. But with tax cuts in the bag and a gold-penthouse-owning mogul at the helm, Republican lawmakers seem to have completely abandoned their fiscally conservative brand.

According to The New York Times, annual deficits are getting very close to $1 trillion, with the national debt having already breached the $20 trillion mark; this quarter alone, the U.S. will have to borrow $441 billion in privately held debt, the largest amount of money borrowed since 2010, just after a severe economic depression. Adding to the tab, Congress is expected to pass a spending bill of more than $300 billion, in part to raise defense and domestic caps by $80 billion and $63 billion, respectively, over the next two years. And Republicans can’t even be bothered to keep up with appearances.

“There . . . seems to be much less of a demand to at least appear to offset spending,” a person familiar with the matter told Politico, adding, “Republicans seem more interested in increasing defense spending than in offsetting costs.” (To give you an idea of the extent to which Republicans have abandoned the principles of their forefathers: The stopgap bill recently approved to end the government shutdown delayed or suspended $31 billion worth of taxes imposed under the Affordable Care Act.)

Team Trump, of course, is still in delusion mode, trying to suggest that the president—who has demanded $25 billion for “border security” (i.e. his useless wall), and is seeking $200 billion in government funds for his big infrastructure project—is totally focused on bringing down the debt. “The president is very much concerned about the rate of increase of the debt and particularly the rate that it grew over the last eight years,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said during a Senate Banking Committee hearing last week. “Over time we need to figure out where we can have government savings to deal with the deficit.” Naturally, he dismissed the suggestion that the tax bill will further exacerbate the problem.

In prior days, the administration’s faux concern may have damaged its reputation with G.O.P. voters, who deplore programs for lazy takers on principle. But evidence suggests that president tweets-a-lot has had a fundamental effect on the way his base thinks about fiscal policy. As Axios points out, Trump’s ascendance has revealed a “massive cohort” of Republicans who rely on programs like Medicaid and Social Security, and who are therefore socially conservative but fiscally liberal . . . even if they don’t know it. “All evidence in the last two years points to the fact that the [Republican] base was never as ‘conservative’ on economic policy as we portrayed them during the Obama years,” a source close to Republican leadership said, which may help explain why Trump has been suspiciously quiet about his campaign-trail pledge to eliminate the national debt over a period of eight years.

The finance community, however, is sounding alarms. “Some of my Wall Street clients are starting to talk recession in 2019 because of these issues. Fiscal policy is just out of control,” Peter Davis, a former tax economist in Congress who now runs Davis Capital Investment Ideas, told The Washington Post, while Ernie Tedeschi, a former U.S. Treasury adviser, noted that borrowing such massive quantities carries a “big risk.”