Donald Trump has weird taste in presidents. We know he admires Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, William McKinley, and Richard Nixon. We know Trump disdains Barack Obama and Joe Biden. There’s another president whose legacy Trump is trying to duck, Herbert Hoover.

Someone on Team Trump must have mentioned the 31st president to the Insult Comedian recently. He’s made repeated references to Hoover when discussing the economy, “I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover.”

Who does? Hoover went from winning in a landslide to New York Governor Al Smith in 1928 to losing in a landslide to New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. The difference was the economy, which crashed at the end of the Roaring Twenties. Like all presidents, Hoover got too much blame for the economy. The Great Depression, however, commenced when he was in office.

Unlike Donald Trump, Hoover entered the presidency with many accomplishments. He served as Commerce Secretary in the Harding-Coolidge administration. More importantly, he was in charge of famine relief efforts in Europe after the Great War and during the influenza pandemic. His humanitarian exertions put his name on the political map and eventually led to his election as the 31st POTUS.

There are many myths about the causes of the Great Depression. Most accounts focus on the stock market crash AKA Black Friday:

I’m not an economist, I don’t even play one on the internet, I’m a mere amateur historian. I believe that immigration and trade policies adopted by Republicans in the 1920’s played as big a role in causing the depression as the stock market crash.

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 put tight limits on immigration including ethnic quotas to keep what GOPers thought were the “wrong sort of people” out of the country. ICE didn’t exist then but bigotry and xenophobia did. This act had the effect of shrinking the pool of workers, turning it into a puddle. That was NOT a reflecting pool reference but…

The Smoot-Hawley Act raising tariffs was signed by Hoover in 1930. It was supposed to help American industry and agriculture but backfired. The tariffs added fuel to the economic fire raging across the globe. Did anyone tell the Kaiser of Chaos that? Unlikely, given that he continues to say, “Tariff is the most beautiful word in the language.”

Oy just oy.

Herbert Hoover was also a businessman, but unlike Trump he was a success, not a fuck up. Hoover made his fortune as a mining engineer, which led to a nickname: The Great Engineer. That, in turn, led wags to say with considerable accuracy that the Great Engineer backed the train into the Great Depression.

Hoover’s biggest flaw as president was his rigidity. He was a firm believer in laissez faire economics in which the free market controls everything and government keeps its hands off. You say laissez faire; I say trickle down. Hoover should have called the whole thing off.

Hoover made belated attempts to intervene in the economy but it was too late. An intelligent man bumbled into economic catastrophe. Trump is an idiot doing likewise nearly a century later.  Hopefully, it won’t be a full blown depression but a recession caused by Trump policies beckons.

As featured image, I used a picture of Hoover and FDR riding to the capitol on inauguration day 1933. Two presidents, one of whom was among the biggest losers, the other the biggest winner. That’s why Trump keeps name dropping Herbert Hoover: His greatest fear is being a loser.

The title is a take on a post I wrote last year, Exhuming McKinley. That’s a take on the REM song Exhuming McCarthy, which I also used as a post title in 2018. Trump, of course, wants to bury Hoover but he’s the one who keeps saying a name that Republicans refused to invoke for decades.

Herbert Hoover is one of American history’s biggest losers.  After Hoover, Republicans lost control of Congress until 1947, and the presidency in 1953. Here’s hoping Donald Trump and his party meet the same fate.

That concludes this exhumation.

The last word goes to the cast of Annie with a sarcastic song blaming Hoover for the Great Depression: