Former President Donald Trump has predicted the economy will collapse, and if it does he just hopes it’s within the next year.
“When there’s a crash, I hope it’s going to be during [the] next 12 months because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover. The one president I just don’t want to be, Herbert Hoover,” he told political commentator Lou Dobbs in an interview Monday on FrankSpeech.com.
Former President Hoover was in office for only a few months when the stock market crashed in 1929 and launched the country into the Great Depression.
Mr. Trump said the current economy is “fragile” and it’s “running off the fumes of what we did.”
His comments were criticized by White House aides and other Democrats.
“This is absolutely vile and just par for the course for Donald Trump, who only cares about himself,” Ammar Moussa, spokesman for the Biden campaign, wrote on X Tuesday.
Andrew Bates, a White House deputy press secretary, put out a statement saying President Biden’s economic progress should be “welcomed.”
“A commander in chief’s duty is to always put the American people first, never to hope that hard-working families suffer economic pain for their own political benefit,” he said. “Republican officials should welcome the economic progress President Biden is delivering instead of revealing twisted true colors that would shrink the American middle class in the name of their own cynical self-interests.”
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki that the former president’s comments are “just another manifestation of the insensitivity and the grotesqueness of this person.”
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
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