Clinton's balanced budget and surplus is a bit of an outlier, and my understanding is that it had two causes. One was the line item veto, eventually overturned. The other was a booming economy and no major wars (peace dividend). We could have the latter now, of course, if we didn't go get into wars that don't concern us.

Bush is when I'd say the Republican Party gave up any actual belief in fiscal restraint. They still use it rhetorically because it sells with their base but they do the opposite when in power, which means they clearly don't really believe in it.

Trump is the biggest spender, and I don't think you can blame it all on COVID because he's still doing it. This shouldn't surprise anyone. As a shady hustler "businessman" he was known as the "king of debt" and borrowed and walked away so many times many banks would no longer deal with him under any circumstances. He's really one of the legendary practitioners of predatory borrowing. Along with "any publicity is good publicity as long as they spell your name right," his other motto might be "if you owe the bank a million dollars you have a problem; if you owe the bank a billion dollars the bank has a problem."

You'll note even the minority party rarely does much about it, like, proposing concrete spending cuts or anything. Not quite never, but rarely. Or pushing actual cuts through a branch they control even if it will be shot down by another. Proposing a concrete cut would open them up to criticism. They just complain vaguely about the spending.