I’m THIS CLOSE to No Longer Being Known as “The President Who Fucked the Economy”

By Herbert Hoover

Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress. Herbert Hoover byline photo courtesy of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum.

Most presidents have one thing that springs to mind when their name comes up. Jefferson: Louisiana Purchase. Monroe: Doctrine. Taft: Fat fuck who got stuck in a tub. Unfortunately, my thing is “was steering the ship when the country plunged into its worst economic contraction ever.” The Great Depression would be the only thing anyone remembers about me even if I’d gotten stuck in a hundred bathtubs.

That’s me — ol’ Shitface McDumbfuck, President for life of Dipshittistan! Go ahead and pelt me with rotten fruit while I pass — you won’t be the first. The universe really conspired to gang bang my legacy sideways, right down to my last name being “Hoover” — you know, a thing that literally sucks!!! Hardy har har, go ahead and make that joke you jagweeds, you can’t hurt me more than the voters did when they handed me an ass kicking that was detectable in distant galaxies. I’ve accepted that I’ll only be on Mount Rushmore if they make a Mount Rushmore of Screwing The Pooch So Hard That You Prolapsed Its Colon.

I’ve always been “the president who fucked the economy”. And I thought I would always be “the president who fucked the economy”, but recently, for the first time in my life or death, there’s been what you living-folk might call “a disturbance in the force”. I had accepted my lot as the answer to the Jeopardy clue “This was the president who shit his pants on the economy worse than any other,” but — well, take it away, Yoda:

Yes: There is another. And the force is strong with this one. Mere weeks into his second term — and the first term in which he didn’t have Steve Mnuchin fighting off his bad ideas like Mace Windu slicing through droids in the Clone Wars — this president has summoned a global financial crisis from whole cloth. Before someone finally convinced the Mad King to pause the insanity for 90 days, the Dow had lost 11 percent of its value since Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement. You know how much the Dow lost on “Black Thursday” in 1929? 11 percent. Well well well — it looks like I have company! It’s fitting that this happened right when Alex Ovechkin was passing Wayne Gretzky’s career goals record — looks like this was the week of people matching numbers that most people thought would never be caught!

The big difference between Trump and me is that he’s creating this crisis entirely by himself. You know what was a major cause of the Great Depression? The weather. The Dust Bowl decimated farming back when 30 percent of Americans lived on farms; it turned a rough patch into a capital-G capital-D God Damned Great Depression. All of that Grapes of Wrath boo-hooing and those Dorothea Lange photos that stick in your memory are largely because of the weather — not exactly my fault! Also not my fault: Why “migrant mother”’s kids were so fucking filthy. Scrub your goddamned kids! The Dust Bowl wasn’t localized to your son’s stank ass; I fail to see how that lady’s D-minus family hygiene is my fault.

The Dust Bowl didn’t destroy this lady’s bathtub, nor was President Taft stuck in it, so what’s her excuse? (Photo from GraphicArtis via Getty)

You know why else Trump is worse than me? He has a cautionary tale to learn from named…hang on, let me check my notes…oh yeah: HERBERT FUCKING HOOVER! I didn’t have that. And yes, I signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which was a major cause of the Depression, mea culpa — that was sort of my Han-Solo-leading-Luke-into-a-trap-in-Cloud-City moment. But when I signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, we hadn’t yet learned the lesson of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which is that tariffs are fucking dumb. That’s in every economics textbook these days, usually in a chapter called “Whatever You Do, For God’s Sake Don’t Do This”. It’s one thing to step on your balls; it’s another thing to step on your balls after a different guy stepped on his balls so hard that generations of scholars devote themselves to warning people about the dangers of ball-stomping.

I don’t deserve to be the president who fucked the economy. I deserve to be “the president who failed to stop the economy from fucking itself”, more George W. Bush than that painting restorer who turned Jesus into a monkey. I’m deeply sorry that I didn’t perform that magic jiu jitsu move to save the stock market that you all would have performed if you had been president at the time. I’m sorry that I put 308 members of Congress in a headlock and made them vote for the Smoot-Hawley Act — the way I remember it is that I didn’t like the bill but acceded to pressure from my party, but that can’t be right, because there’s no “Congress that fucked the economy”, only a “president who fucked the economy”, i.e. me. You know who I’m like? I’m like Ven Zallow during the assault on the Jedi Temple during the Sacking of Coruscant. He didn’t ask to be the last line of defense against Darth Malgus — he was just the Master of the Jedi Order who happened to be stationed at the Temple to protect the Padawans! It was Grand Master Zym’s call, and then Ven Zallow ends up facing three Sith Lords and a Harrower-class battle cruiser, and we’re all like “Gee, he should have done better.” Utter bullshit. Anyone who knows history will surely agree that I’m the Ven Zallow of the Great Depression.

You know what worries me? That Trump might fuck the economy worse than me, and he’ll be known as “the president who fucked the economy” for a few months, and then he’ll do something worse and the title will fall back to me! He’ll be “the president who started World War III” or “the president who spent his final days in office building a throne out of human bones”. That could happen — the rule is clearly that each president gets one thing…oh, except for FDR, history’s little Golden Boy, who is “the president who ended the Great Depression” and “the president who won World War II”, because apparently you get two things if you piss in George Washington’s face and serve four terms. FDR is the Sith Lord Darth Noctyss of the Great Depression if you think about it! But I digress. For the first time ever, there’s a president who might fuck the economy even worse than I did. And — at the risk of being overly optimistic — I think he’s going to do it.

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