President Trump on Thursday signaled openness to a proposal to effectively eliminate the federal limit on government borrowing, a dramatic reversal from his view as a candidate and the long-standing position of the Republican Party that the debt limit should be raised only if other steps are taken to restrain the size of government.

On Wednesday, Trump and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D–N.Y.) reached what one senior White House official called a “gentlemen’s agreement” to develop a plan that would no longer require Congress to routinely raise the limit on government borrowing.

Details have not been worked out, and any plan would require approval from congressional Republicans, but the shift signifies a remarkable political evolution for Trump, who has long cheered weaponizing the debt ceiling, no matter the cost.

“I cannot believe the Republicans are extending the debt ceiling — I am a Republican I am embarrassed!” he tweeted in 2013.

On Thursday, Trump’s approach to the debt ceiling had changed markedly.

Why does the debt ceiling exist? View Graphic Why does the debt ceiling exist?

“For many years people have been talking about getting rid of [the] debt ceiling altogether and there are a lot of good reasons to do that,” he said at the White House.

Trump’s discussions with Democrats on the debt ceiling could mark the end of Congress’ greatest political weapon — a legislative hand grenade that has never exploded but unnerved financial markets for decades.

Rory Cooper, a former top adviser to House GOP leadership, said Trump’s reversal on the issue should come as no surprise, even if it insults the Republican leadership.

“There’s definitely support on the Hill on the Democratic side and even among some Republicans for doing away with debt-limit votes altogether,” Cooper said. “But President Trump is not going to be able to sustain a coalition for that so long as he is slapping leadership in the face in these negotiations.”

The U.S. government is projected to spend $4 trillion this year but bring in only $3.3 trillion through taxes and other fees. It covers the balance — known as the deficit — by issuing debt to borrow money. This debt accumulates over time, and now the federal government owes close to $20 trillion to creditors around the world.

The government can hold debt only up to a certain limit, which is set by Congress. And raising that debt limit is often politically messy, with lawmakers trying to leverage their vote in a way that can exact budget changes from the White House.

“From the economy’s perspective and from the financial markets’ perspective, removing the debt limit from that equation is probably a very, very positive thing to do,” said John Bowman, who worked on debt-ceiling issues at the Treasury Department for 15 years under presidents from both parties. “If there’s no long uncertainty about whether or not — on a date certain — the United States has the ability to pay its bills, that’s a very, very strong good government position to take.”

Then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R–Ga.) drew international attention when he flatly refused to raise it in 1995 unless President Bill Clinton agreed to a balanced-budget plan.

“I don’t care what the price is,” Gingrich said at the time. “I don’t care if we have no executive offices and no bonds for 60 days, not this time.”

It was eventually raised, but the showdown sufficiently weaponized the debt limit for both parties to use in coming years.

In 2006, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) refused to raise the debt ceiling for President George W. Bush, trying to score political points against a weakened White House that he was hoping to soon occupy.

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” Obama said at the time. “It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills.”

It was eventually — barely — raised.

But sure enough, five years later, Obama as president flipped the script, pleading with lawmakers to raise the debt ceiling, saying failing to do so would lead to an economic calamity.

His showdown with congressional Republicans in 2011 took the U.S. government to the brink of defaulting on some of its obligations.

The debt limit was eventually raised after lawmakers agreed to spending caps and other budget changes, but the encounter sufficiently spooked financial markets. Credit rating agency Standard Poor’s stripped the U.S. government of its gold-standard rating, and top Obama advisers have described the episode as one of the most frightening periods of his presidency.

Obama would later refuse to ever negotiate with Republicans on the debt ceiling again, and they acquiesced by raising it again several times.

All told, the debt ceiling has been raised 78 times since 1960, under Democrats and Republicans. It is unclear what would happen if Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling. Wall Street analysts and economists have speculated that it would lead to a large economic crisis, as the U.S. government would effectively no longer be standing behind its debt.

Trump is the first president who had openly cheered using the debt ceiling as a political straitjacket against the White House. He has endorsed many of the Republican Party’s proposals to enforce sweeping spending cuts to programs like Medicaid, leading many lawmakers to think that he would help them use the debt ceiling to cram these changes through Congress.

But since January, Trump has showed little interest in using the debt ceiling the way he wanted to before taking office.

Neither the White House nor Senate Democrats have outlined how they would propose jettisoning the debt ceiling. Vice President Pence is advocating for an idea that would essentially automatically raise the debt ceiling every time Congress approves a budget.

In the near term, the White House and many members of Congress plan to suspend the debt ceiling until Dec. 8, giving them several months to try to come up with a permanent solution.

The Senate approved the measure, 80 to 17, on Thursday, and the House was expected to approve the measure swiftly as well. But a number of prominent Republicans, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), said Thursday that they opposed abolishing the debt ceiling in perpetuity.

Gingrich, in an interview on Thursday, said abolishing the debt ceiling would never happen because Republicans in Congress would never allow it.

“Presidents often have ideas,” he said. “Ideas aren’t programs. Programs aren’t laws. There are long jumps from the initial idea to getting it done.”

But Trump’s courtship with Democrats could give them outsize influence. Democrats have tried to stress that they are the ones who often need to deliver the votes to raise the debt ceiling, even when Republicans try to use it as negotiating leverage.

“Here, the currency of the realm is the vote,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters, not signaling what her long-term preference would be. “You have the votes, no discussion necessary.”

As Hurricane Irma left Antigua and Barbuda’s usually pristine reef-ringed beaches with the pink and white sand, islanders struggled to grasp the destruction to Barbuda’s schools, churches and the homes that many had used their life savings to build.

Irma somehow spared Antigua, which was open for business by Thursday morning. But on Barbuda, the smaller of the two islands with an area of 62 square miles, the ferocious and historic Category 5 hurricane had turned the typically gentle Caribbean winds into violent gusts that decimated Codrington, its sole town.

“Barbuda right now is literally a rubble,” Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne said.

Browne said nearly all of the government and personal property on Barbuda was damaged — including the hospital and the airport, which he said had its roof completely blown away. At least one person, a young child, was killed on the island — one of numerous deaths reported across the Caribbean in Irma’s horrific aftermath.

Now, these victims face yet another threat — a second hurricane, Jose, which appears to be coming for the same islands that are trying to dig out from Irma’s devastation.

The National Hurricane Center released an ominous bulletin Thursday about the new menace looming in the Atlantic: “…JOSE BECOMES 3RD MAJOR HURRICANE OF THE 2017 ATLANTIC SEASON…” By late afternoon, Jose had gained Category 3 strength, and Antigua and Barbuda remained in hurricane watch status.

“We are very worried about Hurricane Jose,” Browne said Thursday in a phone interview with The Washington Post, adding that Irma left about 60 percent of Barbuda’s nearly 2,000 residents homeless and destroyed or damaged 95 percent of its property.

Browne will make a determination by Thursday night about whether to order a mandatory evacuation ahead of Jose’s potential landfall, but added that those who want to leave Barbuda now are being ferried to nearby Antigua.

[Irma more likely to make landfall in South Florida as a ‘dangerous major hurricane’]

As Irma continues its merciless churn toward the U.S. mainland, the first islanders left in its wake are only beginning to decipher the scope of the storm’s ravages.

Deaths have been reported throughout the Leeward Islands, a vulnerable, isolated chain arcing southeast from Puerto Rico, which reported at least three deaths of its own.

Officials throughout the Caribbean expect the body count to rise.

After first making landfall in Barbuda, then strafing several other Leeward Islands, Irma raked the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, leaving nearly 1 million people without any electricity. The Dominican Republic, Haiti and the Turks and Caicos Islands are next in its path. Closer to Florida’s southern tip, the Bahamas remain in danger, and mass evacuations are underway.

The United Nations has said that Irma could affect as many as 37 million people. The majority are on the U.S. mainland, but the residents of tiny islands in the Eastern Caribbean were hit first — and hardest.

Browne told local media that Barbuda was left “barely habitable.”

Aerial footage showed homes with walls blown out and roofs ripped away.

“It was emotionally painful,” he told The Post. “It was sad to see such beautiful country being destroyed over a couple of hours.”

It is, he said, “one of the most significant disasters anywhere in the world” on a per capita basis: Browne said it would take an estimated $100 million to rebuild — a “monumental challenge” for a small island government.

When Craig Ryan, a 29-year-old tourism entrepreneur who lives in Antigua, reached Barbuda by boat Thursday morning, residents lined the beach waiting for rescue. “It’s such a level of devastation,” he told The Post, “that you can’t even see structures standing.”

Ryan’s family business, Tropical Adventures Antigua, dispatched a 75-foot motorboat to make the 90-minute passage between islands to ferry people off Barbuda before Jose’s potential arrival. Some residents remain stuck in isolated areas blocked by impassable roads, he said by telephone as he loaded up water and other supplies at a dock in Antigua.

“We really are in a rush against time,” Ryan said.

[Tropical triple threat: Hurricanes Jose and Katia could join Irma striking land this weekend]

Ghastly images from St. Martin and St. Barthelemy (also known as St. Barts) showed cars and trucks almost completely submerged in the storm surge, and several buildings in ruin.

Witnesses on other islands described horrific destruction and a breakdown in public order: no running water, no emergency services, no police to stop looters — and a never ending tide of newly homeless people wandering the streets amid the devastation.

“It’s like someone with a lawn mower from the sky has gone over the island,” Marilou Rohan, a Dutch vacationer in St. Maarten, which is part of the Kingdom of Netherlands, told the Dutch NOS news service. “Houses are destroyed. Some are razed to the ground. I am lucky that I was in a sturdy house, but we had to bolster the door, the wind was so hard.”

There was little sense that authorities had the situation under control, she said.

Supermarkets were being looted and no police were visible in the streets. Occasionally, soldiers have passed by, but they were doing little to impose order, she said.

“People feel powerless. They do not know what to do. You see the fear in their eyes,” she said.

Paul de Windt, the editor of the Daily Herald of Sint Maarten, told the Paradise FM radio station in Curaçao that “Many people are wandering the streets. They no longer have homes, they don’t know what to do.”

An image released Wednesday shows severe flooding in St. Martin. (AFP)

British Prime Minister Theresa May said the government is allocating more than $41 million (U.S. dollars) for hurricane relief efforts.

Britain’s international development secretary, Priti Patel, announced Wednesday that the British navy, along with several Royal Marines and a contingent of military engineers, had been dispatched to the Caribbean with makeshift shelters and water purification systems. While some in England criticized the response, McKendrick told The Post that he’s worried that they, too, will quickly become overwhelmed by the amount of work that must be done to restore a sense of normalcy.

Elsewhere on Anguilla, some informal reports were less bleak. The Facebook page for Roy’s Bayside Grill, for instance, remained active as Irma passed.

Around 7:30 a.m., the page broadcast a brief live video of the storm captured from inside an unidentified building. With rain pelting the windows and wind whipping the treetops, a narrator calmly described the scene outside. “Can’t see very far at all,” he said. “We’ve got whitecaps on the pool. Water is spilling out. And it’s quite a ride. But thought I’d check in and let everyone know we’re still good.”

Phone lines to the restaurant appeared to be down by the afternoon, and messages left with the Facebook page’s administrator were not immediately returned.

About 1 p.m. Wednesday, the restaurant posted a panoramic photo on Facebook that appeared to show several buildings. The decking on one appeared to be ripped apart, and debris was scattered about the beach. One industrial building had a hole in its roof, but by and large everything was still standing.

“We made it through,” the caption read, “but there is a lot of work to be done.”

Destruction in a street in Gustavia on the French island of St. Barthelemy after Hurricane Irma. (Kevin Barrallon/AFP/Getty Images)

Hurricane Irma just slammed into Trump’s Caribbean estate — and is headed toward his Florida properties

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