Former President Donald Trump warned Friday that electing President Joe Biden to a second term in office would result in bringing back Great Depression-era numbers to the United States.
"All I say is they better hope I win because you're going to have a 1929 number if I don't win," Trump said in an interview with Kayal and Company on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT in Philadelphia, pointing to stock market numbers that he said would drop if he wasn't ahead in the election polls.
"If I weren't leading in all the polls, the stock market would be, I think, 25%, 30% down from where it is right now," he said.
Trump's comments come as polls show that Americans are saying they have little faith in Biden's handling of the nation's economy.
In a Gallup Poll released earlier this week, only 38% of adults said they have a "great deal" or a "fair amount" of confidence in Biden to recommend or carry out the right steps for the economy, compared to 46% who said they have faith in Trump on economic matters.
Further, a recent Bloomberg poll put Trump over Biden in six out of seven battleground states, mainly because of pessimism over the economy.
Biden, though, has been touting his economic achievements, including on Wednesday, when he announced a $3.3 billion investment from Microsoft to build an artificial intelligence facility on a site in Wisconsin where Trump broke ground in 2018 on what was to have been an electronics factory for Taiwan tech giant Foxconn, which did not materialize, reports CNN.
Trump also accused Biden on Friday of "destroying your energy industry" through his policies. According to reports in April, energy costs have risen by approximately 30% since the president took office.
"He's totally destroying it," said Trump. "We had the greatest economy in history, then we had the COVID, and the jobs went down quickly."
He added that where Biden has seen some economic successes, that's because of the "bounce back" after the COVID pandemic.
"You have a very big bounce back, and it all comes at one time," Trump said. "They got a bounce back from our numbers. That's all that is. And even the stock market's good because I'm leading in all the polls."