You could actually eliminate the deficit with a single action:
Require welfare recipients to take random drug tests and work for their benefits. Treat them as — low paid — employees would be treated by any company.
When this has been done at the state level, welfare rolls drop off dramatically. Since $1T of the budget is one welfare program or another, cutting half of it eliminates the deficit.
There is another $500B that can be eliminated by turning the Departments of Education, Energy, EPA, BLM, etc. into think tanks with no field offices or enforcement arms.
Each 5% growth in GDP is roughly $1T, and an overall tax rate of 20% (lower than current) nets $200B/yr additional revenue. We never got the usual GDP growth rates following the last recession, so new policies of lower corporate and working class tax rates, border adjustment tariffs and repatriation of offshore deferred profits could easily jumpstart a decade of 5+% GDP growth.
If Trump was allowed to do things his way, paying off the debt is actually possible. Of course, there are an awful lot of sacred cows and their supporters fill Congress, so Trump won’t have it all his own way. The question is how successful he’ll be in convincing the people that eliminating the debt is actually possible if only Congress would do what Americans want.
That is the lesson from the Carter years. He had an enormous ego, too and he wanted things done his way or no way. His own party rebelled against him and he got nothing done...they would not pass anything. As a number of legislators stated publicly, "I was here before Carter and I will be here after Carter", and that is how it turned out for the one termer.
The legislators will owe nothing to Trump and the way Trump bullies and intimidates will repel Congress and everyone will try to undermine him. Trump had better read some books on how Reagan got Congress' cooperation.