Survey of 154 scholars places 45th president behind even ‘historically calamitous chief executives’ linked to civil war
Donald Trump finished 45th and rock bottom of a list ranking US presidents by greatness, trailing even “historically calamitous chief executives” who failed to stop the civil war or botched its aftermath.
Worse for the likely Republican nominee this year, his probable opponent, Joe Biden, debuted at No 14.
“Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,” Justin Vaughn and Brandon Rottinghaus, the political scientists behind the survey, wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
Honestly, if you talk to most presidential historians they will tell you that you need about 20 years to pass before you can accurately assess a president. There’s too many unknowns that will come to light only years or decades after a term ends, Eisenhower is a great example of this. So these rankings are likely to change over the years.
Although, having seen Trump’s predilection for fraud, decit, and self-serving, I’d be shocked if he rebounds as more information comes out.
In 20 years, we could be up to 48 presidents or more, so you’re right, trump’s rating could get even lower. Hopefully no one beats him.
In 20 years, the number of presidents might not have increased.
Even if the US falls into a dictatorship it’s not very likely that Trump makes it to 97.
good point, surprised he made it through the stresses of being president once.
It’s not stressful when you don’t do anything and don’t care about anything and others around you.
Exactly he spent four years being applauded and complaining about the food.
In his eyes that’s called winning.
Also, Fuck Putin, that horrible man.
Can you elaborate on Eisenhower, please?
Eisenhower was always seen as aloof, sort of a figurehead, during his presidency. However, years after, once his papers were made public, a much different view of Eisenhower started to take shape. He was seen more as a hands-on leader. I believe he was in the 15-20th range in the 80s, but by 2000 was up to 9th, and recently up to 5th (8th in current poll).
Here’s a preview of a journal article that touches on it a bit.
He can’t drop any further
Not yet anyway. Let’s hope we don’t reach a time when there’s a debate whether someone deserves the spot instead of Trump.
I dunno, perhaps they should change the ranking to throw in some additional items like foot fungus, head lice, 2nd-hand dog vomit and such… and then Trump would remain in last place!? :-P
At least he didn’t start a global war on drugs
I did time for growing mushrooms and have trauma from the drug war.
I rank Trump as worse than Nixon.
For what reasons is that?
I would have put Reagan way further down the list.
The problem is how many objectively bad presidents we’ve had. I agree, however, Reagan should be lower.
I’m a little mixed on this. I do think he should be lower on the rankings due to a lot of his shitty policies.
However, he has also done some significant differences that still affect us today. He did make GPS globally available to the public at no cost. Could you imagine having to pay to use your GPS every time, or not having GPS available to you at all unless you were in the military?
People who should be lower: Jackson, Wilson, and Reagan. Fuck those guys.
Reagan can be next to last. He’s done more damage to modern America than all others but Trump
He was tough on the USSR, at least. Obama and Biden not arming Ukraine enough before the conflicts caused Russia to be more successful than it has any right to be
Obama tried, they passed multiple aid packages. Trump withheld the aid, which was the cause of his first impeachment.
Obama could have directly slapped Russia down in 2014, but didn’t do shit. Russia was not punished enough and got more bold in 2022
Except Republicans were polled as well, and then the rankings combined, whereas e.g. Trump is more universally hated by all sides (independents too).
Trump’s so much worse than any of those guys. He’s literally promising to end democracy in the USA and to imprison his political opponents if he wins the next election. None of those others went that far.
Not to mention him being convicted of massive fraud while in office and fomenting a riot against the capitol to try to prevent the democratic election process from occurring. I mean this stuff is absolutely nuts and unlike anything any other president has done.
Jackson committed genocide against native Americans, so I think that’s worse.
I could go on and on about all of Jackson’s atrocities from stealing babies to skinning Native people alive to make bridle reins. But I think it’s enough to say that Jackson was Hitlers wet dream. He quoted him often and even ripped off Jackson’s speech called the Final Solution to the Indian Problem. Yea, Jackson goes last even over Trump.
jackson not being dead last just completely ruins the entire integrity of the list. how can genocide against native americans be better than trump? seriously?
I mentioned in a comment a bit further up but thought I’d offer it here too:
Trump also committed genocide against poor people by lying to them that a global pandemic was not airborne, when it actually was. In the Bob Woodsworth interview, he admitted it. In advance. He KNEW, and he did it anyway.
Plus he led a coup to overthrow the nation so… there’s that too.
that’s worse than literal genocide of an entire race of people? do you really think so?
Not necessarily, but my point was to try and guess what they may have been considering. And if the absolute number of people killed is larger… that could have swayed their thinking there.
Also, you expect more from adults - so if we really have learned from our history and thus are more culturally experienced now vs. hundreds of years ago, then is killing people nowadays “worse” or “better” than to do so back then? It’s really quite a shitty situation that we are in, and my main point is that it it not like we are comparing genocide to no genocide, but rather one form of genocide vs. another form of genocide.
And yet… at the risk of offending you further, an argument can be made that indeed killing your OWN PEOPLE really is on a somewhat different level, as far as genocide is concerned, than killing the OTHER, outside-of-group people.
Not that any of this is remotely “good”, when we are comparing dead last to second to dead last. But… it is somewhat understandable I mean, that the entire list may not need to be thrown out, just b/c the two last places both have genocidal people in them, but with whichever one or the other happens to be one rank higher or lower. :-(
I suppose the argument might be that Trump attempted to ferment a war, and still to this day attempts to do so, that would kill his own countrymen.
Which while morally probably isn’t worse than crimes against natives, is probably worse for a president to do?
Also of course if Trump gets his way he’ll start world war 3, (because that’s a vote winter I’m sure) which would kill a lot more people.
then by all rights lincoln should probably be dead last, a war in which most if not all causalities were americans, regardless if at the time they “werent”
That is Trump’s favorite president unsurprisingly.
Trump also committed genocide against poor people by lying to them that a global pandemic was not airborne, when it actually was. In the Bob Woodsworth interview, he admitted it. In advance. He KNEW, and he did it anyway.
Plus he led a coup to overthrow the nation so… there’s that too.
Yeah honestly I fucking hate Trump but Jackson should be the worst simply because of this. This kind of voids the entire reputation of these scholars in my view.
I think part of the problem is intent versus what he got done so far.
If you want some ammunition in your statement though, add in the bungling of COVID and his anti-vax leadership he probably killed at least a couple hundred thousand Americans.
FDR should be much much lower
Because of the internment camps?
Yes, and agricultural adjustment act. Bribing voters with social security. Attempted court packing. Support of Mussolini. Created UNICOR. Corporatism. To name just a few things.
“Being a traitor to his class, and empowering peasants.” Fixed that for you.
Fuck Ben Shapiro.
“Being a traitor to his class, and empowering peasants.” Fixed that for you.
Yeah no that’s not what I said. He actually empowered corporate technocrats more.
Fuck Ben Shapiro.
I’m confused.
can they just be tied for last?
A great president is one who expanded the institution of the president,
Yea, I don’t know if this definition of greatness is very good
Hahaha at Vaughn and Rottinghaus low-key throwing shade at Biden. Let’s look at their quote closely:
Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump,
translation: his greatest achievement has been not being Trump
resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership,
than Trump (of course)
and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,”
Predicted greatest legacy in the hopefully remaining four years: Be re-elected. Lol
Man i dunno if it was on purpose to basically reduce his legacy to “better than nothing” but they certainly stopped well short of praise, didn’t they?
It’s not just being not Trump. But he beat Trump. That’s like stopping a forest fire from taking out the west coast and calling it “not burning trees.”
translation: his greatest achievement has been not being Trump
No, the achievement was actually winning the election. Unlike Hilary for example.
But, the thing is… she did. The Electoral College was designed specifically to stop the peasants from ending the rich’s preferred party rule.
Well, she didn’t win enough.
2.9 million more civilian votes should have been enough. But this is 'Murica, created by the rich, for the rich, and controlled by the rich. Clinton would have fucked up that steady stream of bribes from Russia.
And Biden got 7 million more votes. That’s his achievement. He not only ‘would have won if not for the rigged system’ but actually won. You see the difference?
You don’t understand The Electoral College, or why it’s there, do you?
No, you don’t understand that Biden is president and Hilary wasn’t. Everything else is just some meaningless BS.
basically that’s why he was elected. he wasn’t trump. That’s his whole platform, that’s it. It’s not necessarily a bad platform, but it’s not really gonna leave much, as far as his legacy is concerned.
he wasn’t trump. That’s his whole platform, that’s it.
Sorry, but this is one of those hyperbolic, uninformed, useless hot takes the Internet LOVES. You can literally look up his platform online, like so many places.
Here’s Politifact tracking 99 of his campaign promises.
27 kept 5 compromised 1 broken 31 stalled 34 in the worksI love these comments. Required the absolute minimum amount of work/“research” and yet utterly devastating and unrefutable response.
inseet honest work doing my part memes
The worst SO FAR
So the bar is set to this level. Lol
“Scholars? Pffft. What do they know???” Every Trumper in existence. And they mean it.
Meanwhile PragerU will do their own survey with a hand picked group of Magats and right this injustice. The only question is if Reagan or Trump will be at the number one spot.
Nixon when he finds out he’s not in the running for #1:
I always thought that Nixon must be doing cartwheels in his grave, seeing what Trump can get away with.
Considering Nixon’s sordid white house vomited up fox news and the premise that a new nixon should get away with it - well, here we are.
Considering Nixon’s sordid white house vomited up fox news and the premise that a new nixon should get away with it - well, here we are.
There’s a 22 year spread between those two.
From the article…
Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974.
From the article…
The Fox News Channel (FNC) is an American basic cable and satellite news television channel that was founded by media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1996.
If Fox News had a DNA test, it would trace its origins to the Nixon administration. In 1970, political consultant Roger Ailes and other Nixon aides came up with a plan to create a new TV network that would circumvent existing media and provide “pro-administration” coverage to millions. “People are lazy,” the aides explained in a memo. “With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you.” Nixon embraced the idea, saying he and his supporters needed “our own news” from a network that would lead “a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition.”
https://theweek.com/articles/880107/why-fox-news-created
Yes it took awhile to completely undermine objective journalism and create a fascist media empire. The point stands.
Yes it took awhile to completely undermine objective journalism and create a fascist media empire. The point stands.
Even the article talks about decades passing between the idea/memo from one person and the actual network coming into existence…
We live in a far different country today, thanks to the vision originally outlined in that 1970 memo, which Ailes realized decades later with Rupert Murdoch’s money.
All things considered, I now do understand what you’re trying to convey with your comment.
C’mon, we all know what would happen… Trump would call them up on the phone and throw a hissy fit, threatening to drop out of the race or something ridiculous and then they would award it to him.
How the hell is racist ass, first amendment hating, flu spreading, ww one involving, klan loving Wilson so fucking high?
Uh… nobody’s perfect, I guess was the prevailing thought? Fwiw, they did address that topic:
Considering drops for Andrew Jackson (ninth in 2015 to 21st now) and Woodrow Wilson (10th to 15th), Rottinghaus and Vaughn noted the impact of campaigns for racial justice.
“Their reputations have consistently suffered in recent years as modern politics lead scholars to assess their early 19th and 20th century presidencies ever more harshly, especially their unacceptable treatment of marginalised people,” the authors wrote.
Jackson owned enslaved people and presided over the genocidal displacement of Native Americans. Wilson oversaw victory in the first world war and helped set up the League of Nations, but was an avowed racist who segregated the federal workforce.
(emphasis added)
So he did drop from 10 to 15 for this reason, but I guess winning WWI still kept him high.
Winning a war that got thousands of Americans killed that we didn’t need to enter is not a good thing in my book. The League of Nations, while admirable, was a failure. Neither of these things out-way the absolute bullshit the man did to civil liberties (imprisoning people for handing out flyers) and segregation. He set the US back decades.
And I haven’t even mentioned his incredible fuck ups with the flu which he was advised against doing. He ignored his medical advisors so that he could wage his bullshit war. This killed many thousands by spreading the worst flu the world has ever seen.
I don’t agree that America should not have entered WW1, winning the war decisively with the entry of a new major power not only saved lives in end, it definitely dissolved three absolute monarchies who were steadfastly opposed to democratic reform. Two of them might have collapsed regardless, but that’s not a certainty.
It absolutely prevented the most devastating outcome at the least: a victory for Germany. A stalemate was possible, even likely without American entry, and that’s something you need a whole book to explore the consequences of, but a victory would have killed European democracy for certain.
It turns out that when you look deeper into Wilhelm’s plans, goals, and beliefs that, shockingly enough, the Second Reich wasn’t all that much different from the Third.
How could it be, only twenty years later?
But, who knows? Maybe without Wilson we don’t get the Great Depression either, but in the end America was still a democracy. Wilson wasn’t why the average American was a revolting racist with delusional economic beliefs in a self regulating market, he was a symptom of it.
I thought about adding more context to my reply - like yeah, to the slave OWNERS it’s not so bad, while to the SLAVES it’s not so great… (even though they were given sammiches sometimes, I presume you know the history of that little gem of a comment:-)
I was not privy to their deliberations but I could guess that they (1) might take into account what was known at the time, and (2) even for something as bad as slavery, if they helped prop up a democracy that would one day lead to their freedom, it still isn’t nothing in that regard, even if it is insufficient on its own?
Similarly, the League of Nations did not work out directly, but even serving as a model of failure, did set the stage for the United Nations?
Hrm, maybe they assigned things to separate categories, so that like once someone already earned the absolute minimum score on something like on a scale of 1-5, he gets a score of 0 on civil liberties, but then other categories are still allowed to raise it up.
And I dunno about not entering the war. People could debate how and why, but “appeasement never works”, and watching as all our allies became conquered nations and knowing that they’d later come back as enemies… even if only decades later, I am not so sure that the question as to whether or not to go to war is as simple as “war = bad, always”. While it is true that there is no “winning” a war, only differing degrees of losing, the worst-case scenario of losing all your allies and then eventually yourself is fairly bad.
I never stated that all war is bad. In contemporary times I’m extremely pro arming Ukraine, Armenia, Rojava, etc. I wouldn’t be against using US arms to stop the current genocide of Palestinians.
Destroying the Nazis was the best thing the US has ever done. And destroying the institution of chattel slavery was the next best thing. Wars can be good.
WWI was a bad, immoral war. Germany was going to lose the war regardless of what the US did. And neither the allies or Germany had any moral standing in that war. It was just a pissing match between shitty colonial fucks that got millions killed for no fucking reason.
And in the end, no one won that war because those shitty colonial fucks ignored Wilson and imposed crippling penalties on German. So even US involvement didn’t give Wilson any leverage over those assholes and just gave them a better negotiating position against the Germans. That is not a good outcome.
Yeah I don’t know that much about WWI, I just recall getting very depressed when I first started learning about the reasons why we were there in college. Basically to make rich people richer, as always:-(.
At which point it has become the height of irony that the USA now is considering joining the neo-Nazis, in the next Presidential election:-(.
Okay so you got me curious so I took a look at the actual survey results, linked to from the article, and two things are somewhat noticable about Wilson to me.
One is that he is, as expected, on the list of the most Over-Rated Presidents. Kennedy, Reagan, Jackson, then Wilson, followed by Jefferson, T. Roosevelt, etc. So they do seem aware of these concerns, though ofc this doesn’t explain why the ranking is so high, even though consistently falling over time.
The second is what is NOT as directly noticable: he is very much kinda average, neither thought of all that highly across the different categories (Republican rankings are originally separated from Democrat ones before everything gets combined) nor all that lowly either. I wonder if he is kinda just at an inflection point, where there are truly shitty ones and truly good ones (in the eyes of their detractors and proponents respectively ofc), but nobody seemed to have quite as strong opinions about him in particular (unlike e.g. Reagan or Kennedy), so he just kinda floats around in-between the others?
Even in terms of the Over-Rated listing (Table 7), the difference between Reagan (83) vs. Jefferson (40) is that twice as many respondents considered the former to be overrated compared to half that number saying so for the latter. While Wilson (60) was directly in between, average to the core just like in every other category he appears in.
Unsurprisingly, Wilson also made the list of the Most Polarizing Presidents (Table 4), but true to form, was at the very bottom of that list, and yet with a higher polarizing score than Clinton who was identified by a higher number of people as being polarizing, but apparently lesser in magnitude than Wilson. i.e. fewer people know as much about the bad things he did, but those who know are more highly motivated to think ill of him as a result.:-)
So like, to Republicans, they considered Wilson (13) to be just below Jackson (12) and above Kennedy (14, but he’s of the opposite party affiliation!), while to Democrats Wilson (16) was just below Adams (15) yet above Monroe (17). So anyway, maybe Wilson is number 15 on the final list not bc he earned that place by being good, so much as being less offensive (somehow?) to all parties concerned than others who were considered much worse? i.e. he didn’t “earn” that spot so much as he needed to go somewhere within the listing, and that ended up being it?
It’s a possibility at any rate.
Edna Krabappel was involved with making the list.
From now on whenever I hear him or someone else reference him as 45, I’m going to remember that what they really mean is that he’s at the bottom of all time presidents in the rankings, solidly at 45th place.
Every 4-8 years we can shift his number down by 1
The real takeaway is that America has had like three presidents that were good across centuries. The rest are pretty dogshit.
How is this remotely plausible as news
By being something you didn’t know before. Kinda the definition. Yes we knew Trump was absolutely shit but that’s not exactly a rigorously tested hypothesis
Sorry, the rapist elector fraud is getting a bad score?
Yes the thrice married rapist draft dodger con artist was ranked poorly
Marry at your leisure; do not rape
No love for convicted fraud? Cmon it was in the news and eveythang
I roll it into con man, I could have really dug into children’s cancer charity defrauder but I was going for brevity.
Trump definitely isn’t as bad as some of the other presidents like Pierce or Wilson. Not to say he wasn’t bad just there’s some recency bias at play here.
I’m not sure… the way politics have changed after he’s been elected is nothing short of insanity. The supreme court effects alone are going to reshape America and set us back decades or more, if we’re even able to hold the country together that long.
Pro slavery Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 which TLDR said Kansas would hold a vote of if they’ll allow slavery or not. Then people started killing each other so their side would have more votes.
Woodrow Wilson famously said “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." about the movie Birth of a Nation which was KKK propaganda. Leading to more lynching and the revitalization of the KKK. Also he did a whole bunch of other terrible things like violating the 1st Amendment.
We have yet to see the full legacy of trump’s actions. He’s still the frontrunner for reelection of one of two parties and unfortunately it’s looking like a very close race.
Inflation alone from massive corporate welfare with widespread corruption will cause vast human suffering.
The outcomes of supreme court decisions.
The lives lost to anti-science promotion during and after the covid response.
The attempted uprising and authoritarian attempts at retaining power. I suspect election denialism is going to stick around.
The plan to politicize a great majority of government positions in 2025 is particularly worrying.
At the same time things may swing back to being more liberal and moderate due to how extreme conservative views have gotten, we’re already seeing it with the senate and the house. Trump is still alive but he’s not going to live forever especially at 77 years old. His legacy will long outlast him though.
Yeah trumps harm is so wide in scope it impacts not just the entire nation but other countries as well. It honestly baffles me that people don’t see it as that bad
Trump said that he would not abide by the election results, meaning that he literally attempted to throw away our entire democratic system of (checks notes) “voting”. While it is true that it was the most inept coup attempt that I have ever so much as even heard of, it still falls within that category. Dude straight-up wanted to get rid of the Constitution of the United States. That’s… pretty bad.
Also, an argument can be made that many of those “excess deaths” could be laid at his feet as well, especially after the Bob Woodsworth interview revealed that he knowingly lied about SARS-COV2 being airborne. And ofc that wasn’t even the most infamous of Trump’s various recorded phone calls!:-P Two of which led him to be impeached… twice.
Fwiw the Guardian article about the rankings did specifically mention Wilson:
Wilson oversaw victory in the first world war and helped set up the League of Nations, but was an avowed racist who segregated the federal workforce.
So it seems like they are considering the impact of their decisions made whilst being in charge, while separating that from their personal morality. The impact of Global Climate Change likely influenced the rankings as well.
They also were pretty upfront with their liberal bias as well.
So yeah, e.g. slavery is bad, but these people seem to consider overthrowing the government even worse. Regardless of whether you agree with their biases or not, I don’t think a “recency bias” is the main point at hand there.
100% disagree. His distain for the rule of law alone will put our system of government at risk for generations. Did Pierce of Wilson try to overthrow a free and fair election?
Wilson literally was jailing anyone who said bad things about his policies with the Sedition Act of 1918.
So the answer is no, he didn’t try to overthrow a free and fair election.
Read this as Biden being 14th worst, not the best headline :p Kinda impossible to rank them especially when either one could have another term still…
They each already had one term, so they would be ranked based on that partial data, even if those rankings would get changed later after a second.
Obama seems too high? Other than being a relief after Bush2, what did he do? Just ACA?
His achievements were a lot more covert since republican opposition left him doing most of his work via EO.
One thing he did was a small program that allowed poor folks to get cell phone access.
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