President Donald Trump has spent the better part of a decade trying to outrun the ghost of Herbert Hoover — and last week, he brought him up twice in two days.
“I never want to be the late, great Herbert Hoover,” Trump told Marc Caputo on “The Axios Show.” Days earlier, at a G-7 press conference in France, he’d said almost the same thing: Of all the presidents he’s studied, Hoover is the one he never wanted to become.
It’s not a new fear, Axios reported. Trump first raised it privately in 2018, asking aides whether he could fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, warning that rate hikes would “turn me into Hoover.”
In January 2024, he went further, predicting an economic crash under President Joe Biden and saying he hoped it would hit before the election “because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover.” Biden’s campaign seized on the comment, mocking him as “Donald ‘Herbert Hoover’ Trump.”
The comparison clearly stings because it’s not entirely unfair. Hoover, the 31st president, was a wealthy businessman elected on promises of executive competence — much like Trump.
Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, now remembered as a protectionist disaster that deepened the Depression; Trump has built much of his economic agenda around tariffs, betting the same tool that doomed Hoover can revive American industry.
There’s also a footnote Trump can’t shake: Thanks to the pandemic, he left his first term with nearly 3 million fewer jobs than when he started — making him the first president since Hoover to leave office with a net job loss.
Trump tends to say aloud what other politicians would keep private. In this case, what he keeps saying is the name of the one president he’s most afraid of resembling.
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