The national debt didn’t simply appear one morning at $40 trillion. It is a Frankenstein assembled over generations, with each administration adding pieces and the interest on those pieces continuing to grow long after the president who incurred the debt has left office. This graphic tries to capture that history by assigning new borrowing to the president in office and then allowing the interest attributable to that borrowing to follow it forward through time. It isn’t a claim that presidents single-handedly “caused” these amounts. Congress writes budgets, presidents inherit commitments, and wars, recessions and emergencies matter enormously. It is simply an attempt to answer an interesting question: If we could trace today’s debt backward, including the accumulated interest on what each administration added, whose pieces would make up the $40 trillion monster standing in front of us today?