Donald Trump continues to remind us that he only cares about Trump. In an interview aired Monday, the former president expressed his hope that the economy crashes in the next year so he wouldn’t have to be “Herbert Hoover.”
When speaking to MAGA loyalist Lou Dobbs in an interview aired Monday, Trump proceeded to take credit for the U.S. economy’s growth under President Joe Biden‘s administration.
“We have an economy that’s so fragile, and the only reason it’s running now is it’s running off the fumes of what we did,” Trump claimed. “It’s just running off the fumes.”
“And when there’s a crash, I hope it’s going to be during this next 12 months because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover,” he continued, when pondering the idea of re-election. “The one president I just don’t want to be, Herbert Hoover.”
Hoover, who assumed the presidency in 1929 as the stock market reached unprecedented levels, saw that bubble burst during his first year in office, leading to the Great Depression.
Trump, who has previously claimed that the “Biden administration is running on the fumes of the great success of the Trump Administration,” accomplished the feat of becoming the first president since Hoover to leave the country with fewer jobs by the end of his one-term presidency.
Under Trump’s administration the unemployment rate surged to 14.7 percent in April 2020 and by the time he left office the following January, the rate had receded to 6.3 percent. Many economists have pointed to the former president’s disastrous leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic as having exacerbated the country’s economic downturn at the time.
Last month, Trump warned that if he was not elected president in 2024, the U.S. would see its economy plunge into a “1929”-era depression. His words arrived as the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record high, and data released by the Labor Department in early December reported that under the Biden administration, the U.S. economy added 199,000 jobs in November, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.7 percent.
While the four-time indicted former president appears to be less concerned about ensuring the economy continues to rebuild and more concerned about how it affects his chances for re-election, he continues to spend his time launching attacks against prosecutors investigating him.
Earlier this week, Biden delivered his first major election year campaign speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Biden emphasized his predecessor’s refusal to accept the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 as a threat to American democracy.
“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him. Not America. Not you,” said Biden. “Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy to put himself in power.”
