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.
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.
The worst SO FAR
So the bar is set to this level. Lol
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
The real takeaway is that America has had like three presidents that were good across centuries. The rest are pretty dogshit.
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.
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.
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
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?
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 steam 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.
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.”
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
In 2009, the nobel peace prize was given to someone for not being Bush. Same difference here.
And that guy did drone strikes on civilians…
(Yes, I voted for him twice)
I’d vote for him again too.
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
I’d place Biden way higher than that and Trump way lower than that.
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.
How the hell is racist ass, first amendment hating, flu spreading, ww one involving, klan loving Wilson so fucking high?
He was neutral for the first 3 years of WWI but then asked congress for permission to intervene against Germany. In 1918 he went to the Paris Peace Conference and helped establish the League of Nations.
Compare that to a polar opposite example: President Grant. Grant was a great person and better for emancipation and reparations than even Lincoln was, but he filled his cabinet with traitors and thieves so was ultimately a very poor president.
Something that people lack awareness of to this very day is that Legislators impacts have nothing to do with their personality but instead how they vote, who they appoint, and which laws they pass.
Grant was a much better president than Wilson. Grant fucking crushed the first treasonous Klan which alone makes him better than the second Klan loving, resegregating, censorious asshole that was Wilson.
IMO Cassius Clay beats out Lincoln on that top 3. Lincoln put off making the easy decision of freeing the slaves until Clay made him do it. Lincoln was more just right place right time. Clay made the times right.
Dang, Clay was also an 84 year old man that married a girl as young as 12-16.
Damn TDIL
According to newspaper reports at the time, Dora was 15 to 16 years old. Her age varies in the few extant records; the 1900 US Census indicates that she was born in May 1882, suggesting that she may have been as young as 12 when she married Cassius M. Clay. Her age was a contentious issue, leading the minister who was initially to marry them to bow out. Clay’s children also objected, and Clay reportedly mounted a cannon in his doorway to deter anyone who intended to interfere with the wedding
Edna Krabappel was involved with making the list.
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.
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
Because it reinforces our existing beliefs. Thus, it gets clicks.
This is why democracy is bullshit. He didn’t invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc. Not a literal war criminal (yet, anyways). Etc
Yeah, I agree.
Biden should have at least cracked the top ten.
Anyways, polls like this just prove people can’t be trusted to vote. Worst US president is not equivalent to least popular. Andrew Jackson was probably one of the worst, George HW a strong candidate.
I think a person’s right to be trusted to vote is a cornerstone of our democratic process.
That being true doesn’t make them mostly not fucking idiots
We can go dumber.
Hold our meth
we asked respondents to rate each president on a scale of 0-100 for their overall greatness
With this phrasing i’d expect the opposite result, Trump voters giving him a perfect 100 tremendous greatness would average out with all the zeroes and at least put him above the 30ish presidents that nobody really remembers
Hopefully this is a sign that the MAGA brain rot is going away.
considered responses from 154 scholars, most connected to the American Political Science Association
They did not poll the general public, only people who read books - and even write them - literally for a living.
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.
