A potential lame-duck Trump presidency 'looms as nation's most serious danger,' experts argue

Donald Trump.
(Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Former President Herbert Hoover has emerged as a popular historical comparison for President Trump because of their respective responses to the Great Depression and the coronavirus pandemic. More recently, though, two University of Texas Scholars — Jeremi Suri and Jeffrey Tulis — argued in The Bulwark that Hoover's final months in office could be a precedent of what's to come for Trump.

Suri's and Tulis' warning is reliant on Trump losing his re-election bid to his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden (a Trump victory would render it moot). The academics write that after a resounding 1932 defeat to former President Franklin Roosevelt, "Hoover was so committed to a vision of the public interest at odds with that of his opponent that, during the interregnum, he sought to advance it and to thwart the policy designs of the incoming administration with every tool in his constitutional arsenal" while also attempting to "sow discord" and "undermine the economy."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.