Donald Trump said he’s hoping for an economic crash within the next 12 months to improve his chances of beating Joe Biden in the November presidential election.
“When there’s a crash, I hope it’s going to be during these next 12 months, because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover,” Trump said during Monday’s episode of “Lou Dobbs Tonight.”
“The one president — I just don’t want to be Herbert Hoover,” added Trump, the current frontrunner in the GOP presidential primary race, referencing the 31st President of the United States.
Hoover’s term began in 1929 when the economy was hot, but quickly descended into turmoil with the Great Depression.
Trump continued: “We have an economy that is incredible. We have an economy that is so fragile. And the only reason it’s running now is it’s running off the fumes of what we did — what the Trump administration did. It’s just running off the fumes.”
Biden had blasted his Republican rival last month during remarks at a campaign reception in Boston, likening Trump to Hoover.
“In the four years Donald Trump was president — and he’s the only president other than Herbert Hoover who actually lost jobs in a four-year period. And that’s why I often…think of him as Donald ‘Herbert Hoover’ Trump,” Biden said.
The US economy, meanwhile, has remained surprisingly resilient as the Federal Reserve has hiked interest rates to a 22-year high in hopes of spurring an economic slowdown that would tamp down inflation to central bankers’ 2% goal.
Just last week, the Labor Department released December’s jobs report, which blew past expectations and showed that employers added 216,000 jobs to the economy — well above the 170,000 payroll gains economists expected, according to Refinitiv data.
Trump, meanwhile, told Dobbs: “I think the country is in the greatest danger it’s ever been.”
“To a large extent, a big portion of that is because we have a leader that doesn’t know what to do,” he added, noting that there was “no money going to Hamas, no money going to Hezbollah” before Biden took office.
Dobbs, a former Fox Business personality and vocal Trump supporter, asked the 77-year-old businessman-turned-politician what he plans to do to help citizens who are financially struggling should be take office.
“What we will be doing is we will be drilling, we will be reducing energy, that will bring down inflation, that will bring down interest rates,” Trump said, pointing to the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline.
The proposed pipeline — which would run through Alberta, Canada and Nebraska — was set set to move up to 830,000 barrels (35 million gallons) of crude daily, was championed by Trump. But shortly after Biden took office in 2021, he canceled the pipeline’s border crossing permit over longstanding concerns that burning oil sands crude could make climate change worse and harder to reverse.
During the interview, which aired on right-wing streaming platform FrankSpeech on Monday night, Trump claimed that his administration created a better economy than Biden’s.
“Inflation — at a level we haven’t seen in 70 years,” Trump said.
Per the latest Consumer Price Index reading — which tracks changes in the costs of everyday goods and services — US inflation rose 3.1% in November.
Though it was the lowest monthly advance since June, the figure was still well above the Fed’s 2% target.
The three-year inflation rate under Biden, who took office three years ago, is 17.2% — an average of 5.9% per year.
Under Trump, inflation averaged 1.9% during each year of his presidency — or 7.6% over the course of his four-year term.
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