Fox News reported on some new presidential rankings, which purportedly show Barack Obama as the #6 president in U.S. history and Donald Trump dead last, and MAGA was not happy.
Fox News on Sunday posted an article about the new rankings by the Presidential Greatness Project, which Fox describes as “a group of self-styled experts.” It states that Abraham “Lincoln topped the list of presidents in the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project expert survey for the third time, following his top spot in the rankings in the 2015 and 2018 versions of the survey.”
…
“Rounding out the top five in the rankings were Franklin Delano Roosevelt at number two, George Washington at three, Theodore Roosevelt at four, and Thomas Jefferson at five,” according to the report. “Trump was ranked in last place in the survey, being ranked worse than James Buchanan at 44, Andrew Johnson at 43, Franklin Pierce at 42, and William Henry Harrison at 41.”
The report states that Obama and Joe Biden “ranked an average of 6th and 13th, respectively, among Democrat respondents, and 15th and 30th by Republicans.”
Here’s the full combined list:
Source: http://www.brandonrottinghaus.com/uploads/1/0/8/7/108798321/presidential_greatness_white_paper_2024.pdf
How the fuck is Reagan top 20
America is a sad place.
Historians create the list, so sometimes it is about the history these Presidents lived through. Reagan is seen as an element in the fall of the Soviet Union, and thus the recreation of many countries and world order.
Puts him at about average. Reagan represents a brand of conservatism that many disagree with but that doesn’t inherently make him a bad president.
I’ve met many people in real life who seem to believe Reagon is great due to his “very successful” Reaganomics. I don’t know if they actually knew what Reaganomics really was or the results of it.
This should really worry Republicans. Apparently this came from surveying people. If Reagan is 16 , and Obama is 7, and Trump is absolutely last, it says a whole fucking lot about the electorate.
Edit: I’m mistaken, it’s political science folks. So probably not as worrying to them.
Yeah. Most of what is wrong now can be traced to Reagan.
That is why I would rate him even lower than Trump.
Some of these positions are a bit… subjective? Obama over LBJ?
The whole thing is subjective, they were rankings done by survey. No one is trying to hide that
You mean the guy who got the job cuz someone died, and then started the Vietnam War?
JFK definitely started the war. LBJ and Nixon just escalated it
He’s got a lot of social reform under his belt. You could argue a lot of that is from JFK. His international politics, not so much
I mean you couldn’t argue that very well. Anyone who thinks LBJ wasn’t largely a driving force behind social reform is insane. I mean personally he pushed a lot of that through. I doubt Kennedy could have.
He pushed it through because he had the career politician connections, which was admittedly 100% invaluable to actually get it done. But the vision came from Kennedy and LBJ largely carried out as Kennedy’s legacy rather than Johnson’s own cause.
In other words, he has large error bars that average out to OK.
Obama was the first President from a minority part of a population and signed Obamacare.
Well, the first part certainly is important. But isn’t related to “greatness” in terms of accomplishments during a presidency. Obamacare definitely counts. Also the repeal of DADT.
But during LBJ, black voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid, and making discrimination illegal (especially employer discrimination).
It’s all very subjective as I said earlier. But there would be no Obama without LBJ.
This list is created by historians. So, it is history of the time and President that is considered.
What you say about LBJ is mostly true, though it was JFK that set those programs in motion in Congress. But, what LBJ also did was entrench the US in a very unpopular war. So much so, he refused to run for a final term.
Which is why I mentioned JFK.
To be fair Obama did end the war his predecessor started.
To also be fair, the US and NATO pulled out fast and let the Taliban take over a place we never should have been in the first place, making it even worse for the people there.
We all know Daddy Bush fucked this up, but the US left a huge mess they didn’t clean up.
I’m glad to see Trump acknowledge and celebrate his place at the bottom of the list.
Carter #1 in our hearts
He may be the best human being in the office. He micromanaged his staff–he required personal signing off on the White House tennis court usage–and never figured out the sausage making process with Congress. His actual accomplishments were limited.
Presidental history isn’t my strongest area, but I’d bump up Eisenhauer before Truman.
I feel the jump after #5 is a pretty sizeable one.
I’m trying to justify moving down GHWB and Jackson, but looking at who comes in after them, it’s hard to come up with anything to put them over either of them.
Looking at the list objectively, it’s pretty amazing the combined list of terrible things we can list off that all these people did. The tops 5 included. But I feel those are the only ones I can say what they did was so monumental that the country was better off after their terms and I wonder if we would ever get a leader like any of them again.
Still sad to see the amount of slavery and war crimes in the top 5 though.
Wtf? Reagan should be a lot lower.
That’s a lot higher than I’d put the guy who so “skillfully” handled the panic of 1837.
Okay, so is this list wrong, or is the article wrong?
why did they only rank top 45? such a specific number.
Because Grover Cleveland fucked it all up by serving non-consecutive terms.
dinglebutt would have been lower, but there were only that many eligible names this go-around.