No I think he does mean trillion dollar deficit.

The US deficit is over $1 trillion a year. The debt is over $23 trillion.

There’s something fascinating about the previous comment. A knee-jerk rejection of the scale. I immediately suspected that commenter hails from somewhere in Europe. The scale is way different here, and in online communities that is often lost as people talk past each other. I think when solving problems there is benefit in thinking about what happens at several different scales.

It was certainly a knee-jerk reaction and totally my fault. I see the concepts of debt and deficit so frequently mixed that it's already in my muscle memory.

Your knee-jerk reaction was half right, by the way: I'm somewhere in Europe where billions and trillions have different meaning.