Why it matters: Smoot was long thought to be moot — widely considered a failure and, possibly, an exacerbating factor in the Great Depression.
Trump has repeatedly said that he doesn't want to be associated with Hoover, who presided over the country during that economic collapse and has forever been associated with it.
"The irony just writes itself in some sense," Douglas Irwin, an economics professor at Dartmouth and author of "Clashing over Commerce: A history of U.S. trade policy," tells Axios.
