The one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover. "Trump often reveals what he's thinking with these comments he makes," said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian and former White House aide to George W. Bush. He grew up in a period where Herbert Hoover was a very negative thing to be." I'm not going to be Herbert Hoover," Bush told the leaders, presidential historian Russell Riley wrote in his book Inside the George W. Bush White House: An Oral History. "Any Republican president who gets hit with bad economic times faces the danger of being tagged as Herbert Hoover," Troy said.