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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House Republicans eked out a win in May with their advancement of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” filled with negotiations and compromises on thorny policy issues that barely passed muster in the lower chamber.
Next week, Senate Republicans will get their turn to parse through the colossal package and are eying changes that could be a hard sell for House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who can only afford to lose three votes.
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President Donald Trump listens to a question during an event to present law enforcement officers with an award in the Oval Office at the White House on May 19. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Congressional Republicans are in a dead sprint to get the megabill — filled with Trump’s policy desires on taxes, immigration, energy, defense and the national debt — onto the president’s desk by early July.
Trump has thrown his support behind the current product, but said during a press conference in the Oval Office on Friday that he expected the package to be “jiggered around a little bit.”
“It’s going to be negotiated with the Senate, with the House, but the end result is it extends the Trump tax cuts,” he said.
“If it doesn’t get approved, you’ll have a 68% tax increase,” the president continued. “You’re going to go up 68%. That’s a number that nobody has ever heard of before. You’ll have a massive tax increase.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has an identical margin to Johnson, and will need to cultivate support from a Senate GOP that wants to put its own fingerprints on the bill.
Senators have signaled they’d like to make changes to a litany of House proposals, including reforms to Medicaid and the timeline for phasing out green energy tax credits, among others, and have grumbled about the hike to the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap pushed for by moderate House Republicans.
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune speaks during a news conference following the Senate Republican policy luncheon at the U.S. Capitol on March 11. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Thune said many Republicans are largely in favor of the tax portion of the bill, which seeks to make Trump’s first-term tax policy permanent, and particularly the tax policies that are “stimulative, that are pro-growth, that will create greater growth in the economy.”
Much of the debate, and prospective tweaks, from the upper chamber would likely focus on whether the House’s offering has deep enough spending cuts, he said.
“When it comes to the spending side of the equation, this is a unique moment in time and in history where we have the House and the Senate and the White House and an opportunity to do something meaningful about controlled government spending,” Thune said.
The House package set a benchmark of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade.
Some in the Senate GOP would like to see that number cranked up marginally to at least $2 trillion, largely because the tax portion of the package is expected to add nearly $4 trillion to the deficit, according to recent findings from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
“There’s just so many great things in this bill,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told Fox News Digital. “The only thing I would like to do is try to cut the spending, and I would love to take a little bit from a lot of places, rather than a lot from just one place.”
SPEAKER JOHNSON CLASHES WITH RAND PAUL OVER ‘WIMPY’ SPENDING CUTS IN TRUMP’S BILL
Sen. Ron Johnson talks with reporters in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., after the House passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on May 22. (CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Others, like Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., want to see the cuts in the package return to pre-pandemic spending levels, which would amount to roughly a $6 trillion slash in spending.
Johnson has remained unflinching in his opposition to the current bill, and warned that “no amount of pressure” from Trump could change his mind.
“President Trump made a bunch of promises,” Johnson said at an event in Wisconsin on Wednesday. “My promise has been, consistently, we have to stop mortgaging our children’s future. OK, so I think there are enough [Republicans] to slow this process down until the president, our leadership, gets serious about returning to a pre-pandemic level.”
Others are concerned over the proposed slashes to Medicaid spending, which congressional Republicans have largely pitched as reform efforts designed to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the program used by millions of Americans.
The House package would see a roughly $700 billion cut from the program, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and some Senate Republicans have signaled that they wouldn’t support the changes if benefits were cut for their constituents.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., warned in an op-ed for The New York Times last month that cutting benefits was “both morally wrong and politically suicidal.” Meanwhile, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, raised concerns about what proposed cuts to the program would do to rural hospitals in her state.
“I cannot support proposals that would create more duress for our hospitals and providers that are already teetering on the edge of insolvency,” she said.
Tom Llamas first stepped into NBC’s Rockefeller Center headquarters in 2000 as a fresh-faced intern.
On Monday, he becomes part of television news history as the fifth anchor of “NBC Nightly News” and the first Latino journalist to helm a daily English-language network evening newscast (one of his mentors, Jose Diaz-Balart, handles the Saturday edition of “Nightly”).
Llamas, 45, takes over for Lester Holt, who will move full time to NBC’s “Dateline” after a 10-year run in the anchor chair. Llamas will remain the anchor of “Top Story,” a live, hourlong newscast on the network’s free streaming platform NBC News Now.
The son of Cuban immigrants, Llamas grew up in Miami, where he continues to have strong ties (pop superstar Gloria Estefan and “Sabado Gigante” host Don Francisco attended a party in Florida to celebrate his promotion). He lives in Westchester County, N.Y., with his wife, Jennifer, three children aged 12, nine and seven, and a dedicated room for his vinyl record collection built from a decade of crate-digging while traveling around the world on assignment.
He recently spoke with The Times about his new role.
You’ve known Lester Holt since you were a 21-year-old production assistant at NBC News. What advice did he give you for your new role?
He’s been married to this job. And so I asked him about that, because my kids have always known me as a network correspondent and a network anchor. But he told me, “Your life is going to change.” And he explained to me that everyone’s going to want a piece of you and there’s going to be a lot of demands, even more than you’ve ever experienced.
And he’s been right about that. He said, “You have to make the right decisions when it comes to your career and your family.” My wife and my kids have known that sometimes I’ll be at a little league game or I’ll be at a school play, and I have to run and jump on a plane because there’s breaking news. And they understand that their dad does that. But we always have conversations about it. And it’s tough.
Do your children watch “NBC Nightly News” and “Top Story”?
Oh yeah.
I had my 7-year-old explaining the election to his classmates. He was walking them through when President Biden stepped down and Kamala Harris took over the nomination. Sometimes it’s tough. They were watching that night during Hurricane Milton last summer when a transformer exploded over my head, and that is a little scary. There were some text messages and calls to me quickly.
Sometimes they watch a little too much and we have to turn it off. But they are very plugged-in; they know the world around them. It’s just the same way I was raised. We watched news in English and Spanish as far back as I can remember. Because my parents were always searching for news out of Cuba.
Tom Llamas reporting from Kyiv in March 2022.
(NBC News)
What are your early news viewing memories?
I can really remember any time Fidel Castro was going to be interviewed. It was always a major moment, right? I remember my parents watching the interview and then deciding if it was a fair interview or not and having an open conversation about that. So I’m hearing about conversations of fairness my entire life. And I see what it means and how viewers react to that.
Did that inspire you to go into the profession?
I don’t know if it was an inspiration as much as it was a testament of how important the news is. It’s just that my family relied on the news. They wanted to know what was happening in their home country. They wanted to know what was happening in America. And they listened, and they trust these people.
What made the powers that be decide that you should keep doing “Top Story” while doing “Nightly”?
It was actually my idea.
Right now, in this country, you’ve got to be everywhere. And I didn’t want to lose what we’ve established for three and a half years. We just got nominated for an Emmy up against amazing legacy shows like “Nightly News,” “ABC World News Tonight” and the “CBS Evening News.” To be in that circle with a streaming show that is three years old, that’s been one of the greatest achievements of my career. Because this was a startup. And a lot of people said we couldn’t do this, and we have.
President Trump basically declared war on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. [The Federal Communications Commission has called for an investigation into NBC’s parent firm Comcast for what it describes as “DEI discrimination.”] Has that muted the achievement of being the first Latino to anchor an English-speaking nightly newscast?
I don’t think I got this job because I’m Hispanic; I think I got this job because I’m the best person for the job. And I know that’s what NBC believes, too.
My life story is something I’m very proud of. [My parents] essentially came to this country with nothing. They had no money, they barely spoke the language, and this incredible country gave them a second chance. It gave them a new home. And they taught me hard work, but they also taught me to love this country. And I do, I think this is the greatest place in the world, hands down. To become the anchor of “Nightly News” tells me that the American dream is still very alive.
NBC’s Tom Llamas in Rome, covering the death of Pope Francis in April 2025.
(NBC News)
You’re from the streaming music generation, but you have a vinyl record collection. How did that happen?
Ten or 12 years ago, I went to my friend’s house in Los Angeles and he has a record player. I think he played “Sticky Fingers” from the Rolling Stones. We just chilled and we listened to the album. And I thought, “What a great experience.”
Then I realized the other fun part about records is just finding them and collecting them, and trying to get original pressings. I have Wilson Pickett records that were made in Spain. I have Beatles records where the liner notes and the album covers are in different languages. I have a room where I have them — it feels like you’re walking into a jukebox. It’s where I read the paper sometimes. It’s where I prepare for big election nights. I’ll be in there for hours. It’s how I relax.
What’s on your turntable at the moment?
I’m in a bit of a hard-bop phase, so I’m listening to a lot of Art Blakey, a lot of Cannonball Adderley. I’ve been trying to find great live albums. I picked up this great five-record set from Bruce Springsteen, the run he had in the late ’70s through the ’80s. And a great album, which I got turned on to, is Elvis Presley’s “From Elvis in Memphis.” He recorded that in 1969, when Jimi Hendrix was taking off and Woodstock was happening. And it’s just a very country Americana album with beautiful songs. It’s got the Memphis Boys backing him.
You have good taste in music.
I appreciate it.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama is facing backlash after saying that creating life is “the least” of what a woman’s reproductive system does.
On the latest episode of the podcast “IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson,” the former first lady and her brother were joined by OB/GYN Dr. Sharon Malone, whose husband, Eric Holder, served as Attorney General under former President Barack Obama. During the discussion, the former first lady lamented that women’s reproductive health “has been reduced to the question of choice.”
“I attempted to make the argument on the campaign trail this past election was that there’s just so much more at stake and because so many men have no idea about what women go through,” Obama said. She went on to claim that the lack of research on women’s health shapes male leaders’ perceptions of the issue of abortion.
Dr. Sharon Malone joins the podcast “IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson.” The episode was released on May 28, 2025. (“IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson”/YouTube)
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“Women’s reproductive health is about our life. It’s about this whole complicated reproductive system that the least of what it does is produce life,” Obama added, “It’s a very important thing that it does, but you only produce life if the machine that’s producing it — if you want to whittle us down to a machine — is functioning in a healthy, streamlined kind of way.”
In the same episode, the former first lady seemed to scold Republican men by saying that the men who “sit on their hands” over abortion are choosing to “trade out women’s health for a tax break or whatever it is.” Obama also criticized Republican women, suggesting they voted for President Donald Trump because of their husbands.
“There are a lot of men who have big chairs at their tables, there are a lot of women who vote the way their man is going to vote, it happened in this election.”
Former first lady Michelle Obama speaks during an episode of her podcast, “IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson” on May 28, 2025. (“IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson”/YouTube)
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The “Becoming” author’s remarks drew criticism from pro-life activists, including Danielle D’Souza Gill, the wife of Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas. The couple announced the birth of their second child earlier in May.
“Motherhood is the most beautiful and powerful gift God gave women. Creating life isn’t a side effect, it’s a miracle. Don’t let the Left cheapen it,” D’Souza Gill wrote in a post on X.
Isabel Brown, a content creator and author, also slammed the former first lady as a “supposed feminist icon.”
“I am SO sick [and] tired of celebrities [and] elitists attempting to convince you that your miraculous superpower ability to GROW LIFE from nothing is somehow demeaning [and] ‘lesser than’ for women,” Brown wrote.
Former First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama attends Opening Night celebrating ’50 years of equal pay’ during Day One of the 2023 US Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on August 28, 2023.(Photo by Jean Catuffe/GC Images) (Jean Catuffe/GC Images)
At the time of this writing, Obama’s podcast is ranked 51 on Apple Podcasts and doesn’t appear on the list of the top 100 podcasts on Spotify. However, it is ranked 91 on the list of 100 trending podcasts on Spotify. The entire episode with Malone is available on YouTube, where it currently has just under 41,150 views so far.
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