Politics
Column: Has Trump just repeated the P.R. disaster that cost Herbert Hoover his reelection?
“Well, Felix, this elects me.”
The speaker was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was at home in Albany with his friend and advisor Felix Frankfurter, monitoring radio reports of a political disaster unfolding in Herbert Hoover’s Washington.
It was 1932. Hoover had dispatched the military to break up a camp of World War I veterans who had massed to demand immediate payment of a bonus they had been promised for serving. News of the cavalry’s gassing and trampling of civilians — the slain including an infant born during the nationwide march of the so-called Bonus Army — would dominate the front pages and tar Hoover’s public image through the presidential campaign.
Flash forward 92-plus years to Donald Trump’s rally Sunday at New York’s Madison Square Garden, a bleak, lurid festival of racist hate and profane vituperation so vile that even fellow Republicans, who have turned a blind eye to Trump’s character for years, are distancing themselves from the event.
Their fear may be that with this heavily promoted event, the fundamental loathsomeness of Trump’s political persona and behavior may break through to the undecided voters he needs to win reelection.
The occasion evokes the line sometimes attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to Mark Twain that “History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” For the attack on the Bonus Army and the Madison Square Garden rally share features that could bind them together as campaign turning points.
As Twain might have acknowledged, the comparison isn’t perfect — among other differences, the Bonus Army attack occurred on July 28, 1932, in the middle of the presidential campaign, while the Trump rally came only 10 days before election day and after early voting by mail and in person has already started in many states. Trump threatens to turning the military on American citizens to quell demonstrations; Hoover actually did so.
But the events do rhyme. Let’s take a look.
Start with the main characters. Hoover and Trump became president after winning their first campaigns for elective office, and both entered the White House as wealthy men. The similarities end there, however.
Hoover had made a name for himself in public service. During World War I he had served as chair of the Belgian Relief Commission, which shipped food to that German-occupied nation, and subsequently as head of the U.S. Food Administration, which aimed to keep food prices stable while the U.S. participated in the war. After war’s end, he became director of the American Relief Commission, which provided food relief to the war-torn countries of Europe.
Hoover served as Commerce Secretary for Warren Harding and his successor, Calvin Coolidge — in which role he oversaw the interstate negotiations that would clear the way for construction of the great dam that would bear his name. Trump’s public service prior to his election as president was nonexistent.
Well, Felix, this elects me.
— Franklin Roosevelt to Felix Frankfurter, upon hearing of Hoover’s attack on the Bonus Army
The two came to their wealth by different paths. Hoover was a self-made man, having earned a degree in engineering as a member of the first graduating class of Stanford University and making a fortune as a mining engineer. Trump inherited his wealth from his father, a real estate developer.
Hoover, like Trump, saw himself as a savior of the nation. “He has wrapped himself in the belief,” his secretary of state, Henry Stimson, wrote in his diary, “that the state of the country really depended on his reelection.” Trump often claims to be the only person who can save America from war and economic depression. Neither, obviously, saw themselves clearly.
On the Democratic side, Roosevelt and Kamala Harris were scorned by critics as intellectual lightweights, despite having had successful careers in government — Roosevelt as a New York state senator, assistant Navy secretary under Woodrow Wilson, and governor of New York; Harris as San Francisco district attorney, attorney general of California, U.S. senator and vice president.
Despite that, FDR was disdained by former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as having “a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.” Walter Lippmann, the reigning public intellectual of his era, deprecated FDR as “a highly impressionable person, without a firm grasp of public affairs. … A pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.”
Trump and his cohorts incessantly demean Harris as — to quote the ever-fading Tucker Carlson at the Sunday Trump rally — a “low-IQ former California prosecutor.”
The Republican Parties of 1932 and 2024 were fragmented entities when they nominated their presidential candidates.
Hoover had proven during his term to be a technocrat utterly without political skills. GOP insurgents (led by Harold Ickes, who would go on to serve FDR as interior secretary) had mounted a “dump Hoover” movement at their national convention; it collapsed for lack of a candidate to take up the colors.
Trump prevailed at the 2024 GOP convention, though not without challenges from candidates fearful of his lack of appeal outside a core right-wing base — former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley collected a strong 40% of the vote in a series of primaries, but not enough to carry her to the nomination.
That brings us to what might be the turning points in both Republican campaigns.
For Hoover, it was his response to the Bonus Army. This was a national movement for early payment of a stipend Congress had voted for veterans of the war at a cost of up to $4 billion — but which was not scheduled to be redeemed until 1945. Veterans could borrow from the government against their bonus certifications, but only at a high rate of interest.
As the Depression tightened its grip on the nation in 1931 and amid soaring unemployment and the spread of shantytowns of dispossessed Americans known as “Hoovervilles,” veterans began to gather in Washington, uncorking fears of civil disorder.
Among their targets was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who was steadfast against early redemption. (Among Mellon’s grandchildren is Timothy Mellon, who is the largest individual contributor to the Trump campaign and other Republicans in this election cycle.)
The Bonus Expeditionary Force, as the Bonus marchers called themselves, originated in Portland, Ore., with an unemployed ex-sergeant named Walter W. Waters as its commander. They started to move east — “hundreds of thousands of men, women, children, and babies … walking, hitchhiking, hopping freights,” as Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen reported in their 2004 book about the Bonus Army.
Most of the marchers fell away en route, but by the end of June a Hooverville-like camp housing as many as 15,000 bedraggled men and their families had sprung up in the desolate, muddy Anacostia Flats area of Washington. They were fed with donated food, treated at a medical clinic set up on the grounds, and mounted a series of marches to Capitol Hill, where a bill to accelerate the bonus payments to the present day was being debated. (It passed the House but was defeated in the Senate.)
Hoover and his aides became progressively more fretful about the settlement at Anacostia Flats, especially when its organizers began to talk about making it permanent. There was talk about its having been infiltrated by Communists and rumors of planned violence. Hoover decided early in July to have the marchers evicted and placed the responsibility in the hands of the Army chief of staff, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
MacArthur assumed the task of deploying tanks, bayonets and tear gas on fellow citizens enthusiastically, calling the camp residents “insurrectionists.” The prospect appalled MacArthur’s adjutant, Maj. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who claimed later that he tried to convince his superior that the job was beneath someone of his rank. MacArthur rebuffed him.
On July 28, the attack began, including cavalry troops under the command of Major George S. Patton. Two veterans were killed in the operation and 55 injured. A 12-week-old baby died after being tear-gassed. The tent camp in Anacostia was burned to the ground.
The following day, Hoover issued a statement explaining that he had acted to prevent the government from being “coerced by mob rule.” He kept petulantly defending his actions to the end of his life. In his memoirs he accused the Democrats of distorting the event, implying “that I had murdered veterans on the streets of Washington.” He charged that the Bonus march had been largely “organized and promoted by the Communists and included a large number of hoodlums and ex-convicts.”
As it happened, Roosevelt as president was no more willing to pay the bonus early than Hoover and Mellon had been. In 1936, Congress overwhelmingly passed a measure to pay the bonus immediately — over FDR’s veto.
The ramifications of the Bonus Army attack live on. It set the stage for the creation of a vast administrative infrastructure of aid for service members and veterans, starting with enactment of the GI Bill, which paid for tuition, textbooks and supplies (and $50 a month for living expenses) to grant returning veterans a college education, making American society into a meritocracy.
The bill was signed by Franklin Roosevelt in June 1944, a couple of weeks after allied troops cross the English channel on D-Day.
It also stands as a warning for Trump that taking military action against civilians will inspire a massive public backlash, which in that case contributed — no one can say how much — to Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide defeat of Hoover just over three months later. Roosevelt’s presidency established a new principle in American politics through the New Deal, that government exists to succor all its people, not just the wealthy.
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Politics
Sen Murphy warns ‘people are going to die’ as Congress punts on expiring Obamacare subsidies
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A bipartisan Obamacare fix remains out of reach in the Senate, for now, and lawmakers can’t agree on who is at fault.
While many agree that the forthcoming healthcare cliff will cause financial pain, the partisan divide quickly devolved into pointing the finger across the aisle at who owns the looming healthcare premium spikes that Americans who use the healthcare exchange will face.
Part of the finger-pointing has yielded another surprising agreement: Lawmakers don’t see the fast-approaching expiration of the Biden-era enhanced Obamacare subsidies as Congress failing to act in time.
“Obviously, it’s not a failure of Congress to act,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told Fox News Digital. “It’s a failure of Republicans to act. Democrats are united and wanting to expand subsidies. Republicans want premium increases to go up.”
Partisan rancor over Obamacare has seeped into how lawmakers view the effect that expiring subsidies will have on their constituents. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., argued that it was a “life or death” situation, while Republicans contended that Democrats set up the very cliff they maligned. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)
DEMOCRATS’ LAST-MINUTE MOVE TO BLOCK GOP FUNDING PLAN SENDS LAWMAKERS HOME EARLY
Senate Republicans and Democrats both tried, and failed, to advance their own partisan plans to replace or extend the subsidies earlier this month. And since then, no action has been taken to deal with the fast-approaching issue, guaranteeing that the subsidies will lapse at the end of the year.
A report published last month by Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit healthcare think tank, found that Americans who use the credits will see an average increase of 114% in their premium costs.
The increase can vary depending on how high above the poverty level a person is. The original premium subsidies set a cap at 400% above the poverty level, while the enhanced subsidies, which were passed during the COVID-19 pandemic, torched the cap.
For example, a person 60 years or older making 401% of the poverty level, or about $62,000 per year, would on average see their premium prices double. That number can skyrocket depending on the state. Wyoming clocks in at the highest spike at 421%.
SENATE MULLS NEXT STEPS AFTER DUELING OBAMACARE FIXES GO UP IN FLAMES
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., doesn’t want to blow up Obamacare or get rid of Obamacare subsidies, but he does want to provide Americans with more options for healthcare. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
In Murphy’s home state of Connecticut, premiums under the same parameters would hike in price by 316%.
“When these do lapse, people are going to die,” Murphy said. “I mean, I was talking to a couple a few months ago who have two parents, both with chronic, potentially life-threatening illnesses, and they will only be able to afford insurance for one of them. So they’re talking about which parent is going to survive to raise their three kids. The stakes are life and death.”
Both sides hold opposing views on the solution. Senate Republicans argue that the credits effectively subsidize insurance companies, not patients, by funneling money directly to them, and that the program is rife with fraud.
Senate Democrats want to extend the subsidies as they are, and are willing to negotiate fixes down the line. But for the GOP, they want to see some immediate reforms, like income caps, anti-fraud measures and more stringent anti-abortion language tied to the subsidies.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who produced his own healthcare plan that would convert subsidies into health savings accounts (HSAs), argued that congressional Democrats “set this up to expire.”
SENATE REPUBLICANS LAND ON OBAMACARE FIX, TEE UP DUELING VOTE WITH DEMS
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., panned Senate Democrats’ Obamacare subsidy proposal as “obviously designed to fail.” (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)
But he doesn’t share the view that the subsidies’ expected expiration is a life-or-death situation.
“I’m not taxing somebody who makes 20 bucks an hour to pay for healthcare for somebody who makes half a million dollars a year, that’s what they did,” he told Fox News Digital. “All they did was mask the increase in healthcare costs. That’s all they did with it.”
Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., similarly scoffed at the notion, and told Fox News Digital, “The Democrat plan to extend COVID-era Obamacare subsidies might help less than half a percent of the American population.”
“The Republican plan brings down healthcare costs for 100% of Americans,” he said. “More competition, expands health savings accounts. That needs to be the focus.”
Democrats are also not hiding their disdain for the partisan divide between their approaches to healthcare.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, told Fox News Digital that the idea that this “is a congressional failure and not a Republican policy is preposterous.”
“They’ve hated the Affordable Care Act since its inception and tried to repeal it at every possible opportunity,” he said, referring to Obamacare. “The president hates ACA, speaker hates ACA, majority leader hates ACA, rank-and-file hate ACA. And so this is not some failure of bipartisanship.”
While the partisan rancor runs deep on the matter of Obamacare, there are Republicans and Democrats working together to build a new plan. Still, it wouldn’t deal with the rapidly approaching Dec. 31 deadline to extend the subsidies.
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., predicted that the Senate would have a long road to travel before a bipartisan plan came together in the new year, but he didn’t rule it out.
“It’s the Christmas season. It would take a Christmas miracle to execute on actually getting something done there,” he said. “But, you know, I think there’s a potential path, but it’ll be heavy lift.”
Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky and Woody Allen were among the familiar faces in the latest batch of photographs released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee in connection to the late Jeffrey Epstein. With the Justice Department preparing to make additional files public, the images underscore an uncomfortable truth for us all: The convicted sex offender moved comfortably among some of the most intelligent men in the world. Rhodes scholars, technology leaders and artists.
Also in the release was a photograph of a woman’s lower leg and foot on what appears to be a bed, with a paperback copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” visible in the background. The 1955 novel centers on a middle-aged man’s sexual obsession with a 12-year-old girl. Epstein, a serial sexual abuser, famously nicknamed one of his private planes “The Lolita Express.” And we are to believe that some of the globe’s brightest minds could not put the dots together?
Donald Trump, who once described himself as “a very stable genius,” included.
“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Later, the two had a public falling out, and Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Great. But denial after the fact is only one side of this story. The other is harder to digest: Either the self-proclaimed “very stable genius” spent nearly two decades around Epstein without recognizing what was happening in plain sight — or he recognized it and chose silence. Neither explanation reflects on intelligence as much as it does on character. No wonder Trump’s defenders keep raising the most overused word in American politics today: hoax.
“Once again, House Democrats are selectively releasing cherry-picked photos with random redactions to try and create a false narrative,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson. “Here’s the reality: Democrats like Stacey Plaskett and Hakeem Jeffries were soliciting money and meetings from Epstein after he was a convicted sex offender. The Democrat hoax against President Trump has been repeatedly debunked, and the Trump administration has done more for Epstein’s victims than Democrats ever have by repeatedly calling for transparency, releasing thousands of pages of documents and calling for further investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends.”
Jackson has a point.
Democrats were cherry-picking which photos to release, even if many of the men pictured were aligned with progressives. That includes the president, who was a Democrat when he and Epstein were running together in New York in the 2000s. Trump didn’t register as a Republican until 2009. Now whether the choice of photos and timing was designed to shield political friends or weaponize against perceived enemies isn’t clear. What is clear is that it doesn’t take a genius to see that none of this is a hoax.
The victims are real. The flight logs are real. The millions that flowed into Epstein’s bank account have wire transfer confirmation numbers that can be traced. What Democrats are doing with the information is politics as usual. And you don’t want politics to dictate who gets justice and who gets vilified.
Whatever the politicians’ intentions, Americans can decide how to react to the disclosures. And what the men around Epstein did with the information they gathered on his jet or his island fits squarely at the heart of the national conversation about masculinity. What kind of men could allow such abuse to continue?
I’m not saying the intelligent men in Epstein’s ecosystem did something criminal, but the lack of whistleblowing before his arrest raises questions about their fortitude for right and wrong. And the Trump White House trying to characterize this conversation as a partisan witch hunt — a hoax — is an ineffective strategy because the pattern with their use of that word is so clear.
We saw what happened on Jan. 6, and Trump tells us the investigation is a hoax. We hear the recording of him pressuring Georgia officials to find votes, and he tells us the investigation is a hoax. Trump campaigned on affordability issues — the cost of bacon, no taxes on tips — but now that he’s in office such talk is a hoax by Democrats. As if we don’t know the price of groceries in real time. Ten years ago, Trump told us he had proof that President Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. We’re still waiting.
In his book, “Art of the Deal,” Trump framed his lies as “truthful hyperbole” but by now we should understand for him hyperbole matters more than truth — and his felony convictions confirm that some of his claims were indeed simply false.
So if there is a hoax, it is the notion that none of the brilliant men whom Epstein kept in his orbit had any idea what was going on.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
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The release of photographs and documents from the House Oversight Committee demonstrates that Epstein moved freely among some of the world’s most accomplished and intelligent individuals, including Rhodes scholars, technology leaders and artists.
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Either these prominent men failed to recognize warning signs despite obvious indicators like Epstein’s “Lolita Express” nickname referencing a novel about child sexual abuse, or they recognized the reality and chose silence—neither explanation reflects well on their character.
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Claims that this is a hoax lack credibility because the evidence is concrete: the victims are real[1], the flight logs are documented[1][3], and the millions flowing through Epstein’s bank accounts have verifiable wire transfer confirmation numbers.
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The apparent lack of whistleblowing from the men in Epstein’s ecosystem before his 2019 arrest raises serious questions about their moral fortitude and willingness to stand against wrongdoing.
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The Trump administration’s strategy of characterizing these disclosures as a partisan witch hunt is ineffective, given the pattern of applying the term “hoax” to numerous matters that subsequently proved to be substantiated, from investigations into January 6 to documented pressuring of Georgia officials.
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Regardless of whether Democrats’ selection of which photographs to release was politically motivated, legitimate questions about masculinity and moral responsibility remain central to the national conversation.
Different views on the topic
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Democrats selectively released cherry-picked photographs with random redactions designed to create a false narrative while attempting to shield their own political allies, including figures like Stacey Plaskett and Hakeem Jeffries who solicited money and meetings from Epstein after his conviction.
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The timing and selection of photographs released by House Democrats appear strategically designed to weaponize the Epstein matter against political opponents while deflecting scrutiny from Democratic figures who also maintained connections to the convicted sex offender[2].
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The Trump administration has demonstrated greater commitment to transparency on the Epstein matter through the release of thousands of pages of documents and calls for further investigations into Epstein’s connections to Democratic associates.
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Characterizing this as purely a partisan response overlooks the fact that prominent figures across the political spectrum, including those who were Democrats when they associated with Epstein in the 2000s, had connections requiring examination[2].
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Friday that more than 2.5 million illegal immigrants have left the United States since President Donald Trump returned to office this year, citing a sweeping immigration crackdown that it says led to the “most secure border in American history.”
In a year-end report highlighting the agency’s accomplishments, DHS claimed that illegal border crossings plunged 93% year-over-year, fentanyl trafficking was cut in half, and hundreds of thousands of criminal illegal immigrants were either arrested or deported, amounting to a dramatic shift from the Biden administration.
“In less than a year, President Trump has delivered some of the most historic and consequential achievements in presidential history—and this Administration is just getting started,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are making America safe again and putting the American people first. In record-time we have secured the border, taken the fight to cartels, and arrested thousands upon thousands of criminal illegal aliens.”
EXCLUSIVE: MILLIONS OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS LEAVE US IN RECORD-BREAKING YEAR UNDER TRUMP POLICIES, DHS SAYS
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Friday that President Donald Trump “has delivered some of the most historic and consequential achievements in presidential history” since he took office on Jan. 20. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
While Trump’s first year back in office was “historic,” the administration “won’t rest until the job is done,” Noem added.
Of the 2.5 million illegal immigrants that left the country since Trump took office on Jan. 20, an estimated 1.9 million self-deported and more than 622,000 were deported, according to DHS.
The Trump administration has encouraged anyone living in the United States illegally to return to their native countries using the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Home Mobile App, which allows users to claim a complimentary plane ticket home and a $1,000 exit bonus upon their return.
BIDEN ADMIN MARKED ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT, ALLEGED MURDERER AS ‘NON-ENFORCEMENT PRIORITY,’ DHS REVEALS
United States Customs and Border Protection sent boats to the Chicago River amid “Operation Midway Blitz” on Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025. (Chicago Tribune/Getty Images)
CBP seized nearly 540,000 pounds of drugs this year, almost a 10% increase compared to the same time frame in 2024, DHS said, adding that the U.S. Coast Guard has retrieved roughly 470,000 pounds of cocaine, or enough to kill 177 million people.
Taxpayers have been saved more than $13 billion at DHS, the agency said, noting that several agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Secret Service have returned “to their core missions.”
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Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem touted the progress made during President Trump’s first year back in office. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Secretary Noem awarded $10,000 bonuses earlier this year to TSA officers and personnel who displayed exemplary service, overcame hardships, and displayed the utmost patriotism during the 43-day government shutdown.
DHS touted the administration’s achievements, asserting that “countless lives have been saved” this year and “the American people have been put first again.”
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