In an interview posted Monday on Mike Lindell's new streaming network, Donald Trump told disgraced former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs that he really hopes the economy crashes as soon as possible.
While Americans are climbing out of the economic fall in 2020, numbers have slowly improved, charts posted by the Washington Post explain. Inflation is continuing to go down. Employment continues to go up. After Republicans blamed President Joe Biden for high gas prices, those have fallen.
“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 said. “It’s just running off the fumes.”
Over and over, Trump says he doesn't want to be Herbert Hoover.
“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. The one president I just don’t want to be, Herbert Hoover," he continued.
Trump means that he doesn't want to be caught holding the bag, but the reality is that Herbert Hoover was attacked by Americans at the time for causing the Great Depression. He lost about 11 million jobs, while Trump's job crash was twice as large at 22 million at its worst point in 2020.
Trump warned when he was running in 2020 that if elected, Joe Biden would cause another depression, the stock market would crash and other disasters would unfold. Instead, the opposite has happened, explained economics columnist Paul Krugman for The New York Times. Even the stock market set a new record. Still, Republicans claim the sky is falling or it's about to fall.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) was criticized early last year for claiming that "extreme" Republicans are hoping for an economic crash and that ushering in another government shutdown could help them create one.
New York Times editorial board member Binyamin Appelbaum, who writes about economic issues, explained in a Monday column that these are the seeds that are being planted. He explains it's only the beginning and that Biden can "can make a strong case for his stewardship of the American economy."
The Biden campaign was quick to capitalize on the moment, posting the video on social media.
