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Ahead of Election Day 2020, Donald Trump repeatedly warned the public that if Joe Biden were elected, the U.S. economy would collapse. The then-president’s rhetoric wasn’t based on anything real or substantive; he just hoped to scare voters into re-electing him.
It led the Republican to declare at the final debate of the 2020 cycle, “They say the stock market will rule if I’m elected. If he’s elected, the stock market will crash.”
Trump’s predictions, we now know, were spectacularly wrong. As Biden prepares to seek a second term, Americans are seeing historically low unemployment, economic growth, shrinking inflation, rising wages, falling gas prices, a rising stock market, and improved economic optimism. In October 2020, Trump insisted that Democratic policies would “unleash an economic disaster of epic proportions” and force the country “into depression.”
He was wrong. None of that happened.
And so, as the former president tries again, he’s in a bit of a bind. How can the likely GOP nominee explain away, not only his failed predictions, but the Democrat’s many economic successes? In recent weeks, Trump has resorted to describing economic data he doesn’t like as “fake,” but as NBC News reported overnight, the Republican rolled out an entirely new line during an interview with Lou Dobbs.
“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 during a sit-down interview with Lou Dobbs. “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 added.
By all appearances, the former president didn’t appear to be kidding.
To the extent that reality matters, the details are worth dwelling on. For one thing, there’s nothing to suggest the strength of the economy is “fragile”; Trump just made that up. For another, it continues to be amusing to see the Republican explain Biden’s economic successes by trying to take credit for them.
But what mattered most in this on-air interview was Trump’s striking candor: He expects an economic crash, and he wants it to happen relatively soon so that it doesn’t hurt him politically. The likely Republican nominee is apparently rooting for economic conditions that cause widespread suffering in a way that wouldn’t make him look bad.
It’s one thing when a presidential hopeful thinks along these lines but has the good sense not to share such thoughts on camera. But Trump doesn’t see the need for a filter: He’s hoping for his own country’s economy to take a sharp downturn, indifferent to the consequences, just so long as it happens quickly so it wouldn’t cause him any p.r. inconveniences.
In a normal political party, this would likely be a campaign-killing mistake. In the race for the Republicans’ 2024 nomination, the comments are unlikely to hurt Trump’s candidacy at all.
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