MAGA freaks out after Fox News reports Obama in top 10 presidents — and Trump in dead last
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."
https://www.rawstory.com/maga-freak-out-trump-obama-rankings-fox/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
Trump sucks but Benedict Arnold sucked so much his name became synonymous with traitor.
Give it time.
The Revolution managed to succeed anyway. We're still not sure our democracy (flawed as it is) can survive Trump.
Benedict Arnold got in a position to be traitor by being a war hero. Even as a traitor , he followed his conscience.
Trump got in his position by being a real estate grifter, playing shell games with New York City real estate, hiding income to take multiple properties through bankruptcy while having a positive income, not paying contractors and employees, etc. Out of vanity he paid to host his own “reality” show then somehow stumbled into connecting with half the population through outrage and misdirection who nevertheless elected him president. Somehow this narcissistic incompetent bombastic sleazy salesman commanded enough popular support for the Republican Party to worship at his feet, be afraid to contradict his words. Somehow this treasonous buffoon spouts sexist garbage worse than what got Clinton impeached but that’s ok, supports our Cold War enemy and current yet people are ok with it, reduces government services while enriching himself and his family, incites an attempt to circumvent the election but people still want to choose him, actually says he will act as a dictator yet there’s still support, damaged the ability of our government to function but that’s cool, started trade wars out of spite or impulse yet no one objects, then there’s the matter of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths by contradicting his own public health advisors on how to handle an epidemic
So eventually I can expect there to be a kickass way to cook eggs named after Trump?
If you serve me something trump-style, I will assume it is overpriced, poorly made, and possibly not even food.
The irony is that 'trump' used to mean overcoming, or offering something better than the previous offer. Originated from the word 'triumph'. The common term was 'trump card', but it's also a verb. In all cases, it was a positive idea.
Now I can't even bring myself to use it during card games.
In the UK, 'trump' means fart.
And that you didn't pay whoever made them.
So McDonalds.
And made by someone that isn't going to get paid.
Don't forget the side of hair
Nah, it's gonna be Steak Trump, which is just any steak with McDonald's ketchup on it.
I took to calling a well done steak with ketchup "Presidential".
Well done steak is understandable for older folks raised in a tiny town. My mom eats it well done because they didn't even have fridges. Better make sure it's well cooked so you don't get sick. Some people cook it beyond well done where it's getting into charcoal territory, that plus ketchup is what I call ala trump.
This doesn't describe me but I prefer my steaks well done. The thing is, it's harder to do a well done steak right than most other levels of done-ness because there's less leeway (basically there's a wide spread where something is medium rare, but a fine line between well done and shoe leather). Usually the trick is to stop cooking it shortly before you think it's actually done and then let it rest covered to finish from the residual heat.
The ketchup thing is just gross though. Mix a bit of red wine, worcestershire, soy sauce, garlic, onion and store-bought steak sauce and cook it a bit to let the wine reduce, let everything mix and thicken it a bit.
Cube steak.
Nah it would be one of the souls of the thousands of unsold sneakers with ketchup on it.
Trump Eggs : rotten to the yolk.
(And small. Very small.)
If by 'kickass' you mean 'shirred in shit', yeah.
think of it this way. noone outside America knows who that is.
everyone knows who Trump is
modern day media has a big impact on that, also you being part of that history.
Imagining: the British have a statue to Benedict Arnold with the inscription "loyal" on it that they throw a towel over every time American tourists walk by while innocently whistling
Wasn't he actually very patriotic? He just hated the French that bad.
The guys who won the Revolution for us?
Sounds like his "patriotism" was British.
Im not sure he's going to be alone in that category much longer
Says the person not currently haunted by the spirit of Benedict Arnold's leg.
Sure, he was a traitor for a period, and did some pretty horrible things during that time (such as the invasion of Quebec) but he did end up restoring his original loyalties eventually.
Go read about Benedict Arnold. He was actually kind of a hero iirc that fucked up.
He lost almost all his battles, picked a fight with every fellow officer around him, and committed treason because they wouldn't let him openly be a war profiteer, everyone else having the good sense to hide their corruption. His naked ambition, greed, and open jealousy are simple historical fact.
There's a fair enough point that losing battles and winning the war is just how the Revolution was, so he might well deserve more credit for military competence than his record implies, but Arnold did more than "make a mistake" by trying to sell West Point to the British.
Also, just fyi:
After defecting to the British he burned the city of New London to the ground and executed the garrison of Fort Grinswold after they surrendered.
Not even remotely. Without massive help from the Republican party, he would have gotten nothing accomplished. Despite being the second coming of Reagan. Even Reagan was far worse than Trump. The collective efforts of the Bush family over the last 100 years dwarf and are also part of Reagan's legacy.
Don't get me wrong. Trump is awful. The Republican party is the problem however. They could stop him at a moment's notice and kick him out. But they refuse to simply because their monster got away from them. And he's currently got control.
So, we have a two party system because FPTP voting always collapses into one given enough time. But there's no requirement that those two parties be "Democrats" and "Republicans", especially not as you know them now.
The GOP is worried that Trump's cult is large enough that if they tried to boot him out directly that it would cause a massive party split of the sort that leads to a decade or so having three parties (and Democrats winning a lot because the right wing vote is split) until either the GOP or MAGA comes out on top and absorbs the other - and they aren't sure MAGA wouldn't win that in the end.
It's better for the GOP long term if they let him tucker himself out or ideally get criminally convicted of things that make him ineligible under 14A Sec 3 in the hopes they can fold much of the cult back into their numbers but keep them politically active. If he gets barred under 14A Sec 3 then the GOP can get cultists to vote for them under claims that they'll fix that, and then just not bother to.
That's cynical thinking and it's untrue. He can do a lot of damage in the interim. It would be worse than 20 to 30 years in the wilderness. Especially seeing as a Democratic party isn't a solid cohesive group itself. It's already a coalition party. And if there were less pressure to force a lot of us together, we'd split into other parties ourselves and pursue goals that actually align with our beliefs. For a lot of people including myself. Democrats simply represent a slower, slightly more humane slide into fascism.
We're literally staring down the barrel at the end of democracy. As they try to play chicken with the lead addled losers they've engineered. Thinking to themselves "hey, maybe if we keep our heads down and keep enabling them we can be in charge of whatever is left someday" That shit isn't rational, or reasonable. Especially considering how many Democrats would sorely love to work with them again if they just kicked the greasy toad to the side of the road.
Nope. Literally it isn't. They could kick him to the curb at any point. If he's controlling them, why did he do largely what they wanted in office. Yes they throw red meat to the morons too. But make no mistake as to who's in control. It's still the same wealthy people who were before.
All Trump has done is give the permission to openly be themselves. They're still the same crazies they were before he got in office.
Who didn't see that coming-Trump is the worst president.
Remember when Trump asked Russia to help him win the election. Or when Trump thought light brought into the body would cure covid. Or when Trump believed the murderer Putin over our own government. Or...well I could go on, but Trump worked for that last spot on the list. He deserves it.
I'd hazard a guess that it's less to do with his conduct as president, rather more of what he actually did in office. I honestly can't think of anything his administration "achieved" aside from massive tax cuts for the rich. Obama had the ACA, Biden has his massive economic recovery and job creation, Trump has nothing of value.
Does fucking up the covid response and breaking the brains of all Americans count as achievements?
Usually when I try to think of it all I can remember is space force. Still a stupid name, and I can’t believe they couldn’t come up with something better.
Not sure if that’s achieved though, but was prolly a good thing to have a dedicated group to it then funneling through the Air Force
The Space Force was a long time coming. Trump didn't come up with the idea for an entire new branch of the armed forces and have it created while he was in office.
From wiki
If you want to credit it to Eisenhower sure, but still technically it was established under trump so that’s the best I have for remembering what he did in office.
I still think it's a little premature, but probably only by a decade or so.
I still have a hard time taking them seriously, with the way it was rolled out. I know it’s probably a good idea, given how critical space technology is, and that it will just keep getting more and more critical, but wow did they make it sound ridiculous at first. It’s hard to get past that first inpression
Agreed. Add to it Steve Carell’s show (although wasn’t great) after definitely didn’t help its credibility.
Well uh definitely no likely Trump voters and likely about half of 'independents', so something like 60 ish percent of American voters?
You must either be European or otherwise blissfully ignorant of American society.
Based on the below chart from the people who did the survey even self identified conservatives and Republicans put him in the 40's. He seemed doomed to bottom tier even if they just used the people who should love him most to do the ranking.
Welp, I was wrong!
And so early on a Monday morning to post this too...
Raw Story is garbage. Not because it's partizan, but because it's lazy.
"MAGA freaks out..." is 3 people responding to a fox news tweet identified by their twitter handle, another who's not even identified that way, and some other rando who doesn't agree. That's it, that's the story.
IDK what kind of sweatshop the reporters working for that outlet are laboring under, but there is nothing in this "article" that couldn't be hammered out in 10 min on a smartphone.
Just because it's lefty garbage, doesn't mean it's not garbage.
Step 1: Put out outrageous conspiracy theories or policies on twitter
Step 2: Wait for crazies to comment and create a high engagement shitstorm
Step 3: Now you can reference those outrageous things on mainstream media
...
Step 4: Profit
Step 5: Armageddon
Ah damn you, I've been banned already just for viewing your comment!
Narrator: it was actually the exact same flavor
Painting an entire federation with the actions of its worst is fun. It's like how all americans are Ted Bundy.
That is basically the schtick that every tabloid and every partisan site puts out. Visit the Daily Mail (actuall don't) and every other story is some garbage from social media that they've decided to turn into click bait.
Ummm..... It's not new. Noam Chompsky may have gone off the deep end here in the last few years, but he had a point when he wrote that book in 1988, about events that happened between ≈1960 till ≈1980. This is a well known political strategy that has been used by multiple countries since 1898 when William Randolph Hearst declared, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."
The only real "new" part is that we now have the ability to network so inefficiently that we constantly form echo chambers, emboldening the fringe elements, allowing them to connect to each other extremely efficiently, and maybe allowing the people that are supposed to be watching, to actually watch. I suspect the last part is severely corrupted though.
Bonus points if this article was published while on the can.
Sad thing is: it's generating clicks regardless of how crap the article is, because that title is just so bait-y. :(
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.
I'm glad to see Trump acknowledge and celebrate his place at the bottom of the list.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They should have ranked his 1st and 2nd terms individually smdh
dinglebutt would have been lower, but there were only that many eligible names this go-around.
For me, Trump is ultimately the last president who could possibly have enacted and globally promoted actual climate science based reforms that at least might have stood a chance at preparing America and the world a way forward through what is going to be an extremely challenging next few decades.
Instead he was an incompetent idiot criminal mobster bully who crystalized nascent fascism, religious extremism and anti intellectualism into an unstoppable political force, and in the process broke basically the brains of all of America in one way or another, utterly destroyed our reputation to the rest of the world, and has left an utterly catastrophic political situation in his aftermath, that basically only FDR could possibly hope to do any better than mitigate.
Say what you will about exact placement of other Presidents but Trump very obviously deserves the bottom spot.
The fact that having this 'opinion' outloud in a bar in basically most of America would get me assaulted is further proof that this collosal evil doofus is essentially the best argument against American Exceptionalism I can think of, but I am again literally likely to be assaulted for having it.
Anyway, tl:dr, we're doomed now, thanks Trump.
Worst is a pretty high bar to clear though. Like, Jackson literally committed the Trail of Tears, genociding all the Indians against the express orders of the SCOTUS, who he told to pound sand because he controlled the army and there wasn't jack or shit they could do to stop him.
Like, Trump was real real bad for sure, but like, Trail of Tears, literal death marches at gunpoint bad? Idk.
Wait until his second term and you will probably agree with the lowest possible rank for Trump.
Or you can make the sort of detached cynical and dehumanizing raw numbers argument that without Trump doing basically everything he could to fuck up handling covid and spread insane misinformation, he is largely the most responsible of all people in America for covid deaths beyond basically the first wave, roughly 9 times more people than were killed/displaced/genocided than Jackson's trail of tears.
I dont even want to attempt to get into some kind of moral argument about which of those things is worse, so there ya go, numbers based.
Just to add I think you could make some of the same arguments for the degrading of healthcare/social safety nets and the EPA. If we're purely talking numbers and not specific cruelty.
I imagine you would compare the US numbers with peer nations to get an estimate how much is on him.
One of the many fucked up things Trump did--there are so many that it's easy to forget--was meeting with Navajo tribe veterans under a Jackson portrait. He loves Jackson and would repeat all Jackson did if he could.
I mean, trump would have loved to create his own trail of tears (not that he knows what that was, historically). I guess it's reasonable to deny credit for what he wanted to do versus what someone actually did, though.
The thing is, he had so many opportunities to do a handful of good things and STILL did the other fascism stuff and he probably would have won reelection. I mean, Nixon at least gave us the EPA and cleaned up our waters.
I mean, it was a freebie. Covid? If he went all in on saving lives we could be living in Trumpland right now. Instead he might have killed hundreds of thousands of people with his dumb mouth.
Trump is really testing our democracy right now.
He has already broken it.
As bad as Trump is, Democrats are pretty much equally inept when it comes to dealing with climate change. All but the most progressive Dems are just as beholden to fossil fuels interests. We needed Gore to win back in 2000 for any real difference to be made. Now we're doomed regardless.
The Inflation Reduction Act was the most powerful climate law ever passed in the US, and it was significant enough that it forced European countries to pass similar legislation.
It certainly doesn't fix climate change suddenly, but it's incorrect to say Democrats are as bad. They're at least meaningfully trying. Trump and Republicans are actively wanting to make things worse.
>The Inflation Reduction Act was the most powerful climate law ever passed in the US
by what metric
Most spending towards climate change, at $369 billion.
And, from a political perspective, it forced other countries to make similar legislation.
the Organic Act preserved vast swathes of the united states against development. the bureau of land management established under truman has done the same with other federal lands (with varying degrees of success).
how can you quantify the relative value of these against the IRA? i don't think the simple summing of budgetary allowances is a good metric to decide whether it's teh most powerful climate law ever passed.
Let me rephrase -- most powerful climate change law ever passed. Not overall climate and environment. The establishment of the EPA would be a strong contender for the most powerful environmental law ever passed, that's for sure.
if the money is spent correctly, maybe. i haven't read it, but I'm wary it may spend 200billion on clean coal and the rest on hydrogen fuel cells (as examples)
Are Democrats just as bad? No. But they are equally inept. They align themselves with business interests and favor preserving the status-quo over the dramatic systemic change that is required to address climate change. Anything they allow to pass is like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound. Far too little, far too late. Neo-Liberal incrementalism is what doomed the world, reactionary conservatism is mearly a by-product.
The law isn't about preserving the status quo though. It has massive subsidies and provisions to create a brand new status quo. The idea of the law is to build up American green energy companies so that they'll be global leaders in the space.
I agree it isn't the full solution, but it is still significant, and it's trying to make some systemic changes.
I agree, but then you have to have a discussion about what actual voting fraud looks like, and also involve climate change.
I have attempted to do this with a few Republicans these days.
It generally ends with them become irate, loud, angry and throwing out insane nonsense.
I think you're too optimistic unfortunately.
Well that would make you the actual only person I have ever met that has said any opinion I have about politics is too /optimistic/.
I have spent my entire life being called overly pessimistic about the political nature of America, and while I have been wrong about some things and learned /why/ and then learned more, you are again the only person who has ever said I am too optimistic and this is both baffling and in a weird way sort of validating.
For my full actual outlook for the future, I am basically educated guessing that while the financial elites of America have been so far successful in convincing a good number of non poor people that the economy is in a sort of low growth holding pattern, this will fall apart due to the now for several months ongoing military/piracy fun going on near Yemen.
No amount of financial fuckery and op eds will be able to mask the downturn which I estimated several months ago now would cause such significant logistical strain on basically the global capitalist machine in general that it would result in an actual negative GDP print for the US economy in either Q1 2 or 3 of this year. The UK has apparently already had that happen.
What this means is the economy will officially shit itself and basically barring Trump literally being incarcerated, he will win over Biden.
If Trump /is/ literally incarcerated, enough Republicans will lose their minds that they will basically attempt to secceed even harder and basically do something like another insurrection and/or mass wave of basically domestic terrorism to the point that it will be obvious that the US is balkanizing.
While I consider this Trump being incarcerated scenario overall less likely, if Trump wins he will basically end American democracy and his total inability to have any kind of policy that makes any kind of sense will basically lead to horror misery and further impovershment of the masses, while he basically just orders his goons to order their goons to direct the idiot violent followers of his to be brownshirts.
Either way, the climate has now basically indisputably passed the 1.5C threshold, is actually basically trending closer to the worst case scenario envisioned by the last IPCC that actually bothered to model such things, possibly even worse, which means we are guaranteed basically everything most people need to routinely purchase becoming more expensive, more failing infrastructure, more unchecked corporate greed, hundreds of millions of climate refugees in this decade alone, and we in America will basically either be having a civil war or being crushed under an authoritarian boot while this happens.
There.
Am I still too optimistic?
lol, in a sad way. I think you're pretty much spot on except for the climate part. I think the last president who could have done anything meaningful was probably Bush senior and not Trump. I'm still gonna recycle and stuff, but we are way past any hope of anything less than catastrophe imo. I'd put money on it except I'm not holding out much hope of the dollar holding much value.
This probably won't make you feel any better, but with how long it takes our actions to make a significant impact on the climate, he could've been a climate messiah and the next few decades would probably still be the same.
I'm not sure when the tipping point was, but we've long since passed the point where we could avoid the whole problem by reducing emissions. We've been locked into a dynamic now where we not only need to reduce emissions to fix the climate, we need to take mitigative measures against the effects of climate change. These next couple decades are going to be a combination of promoting green energy and defending ourselves from climate change. We couldn't stop the monster from being born, so now we have to fight the monster while also saving everyone from it.
I have hope we'll manage it though. There was a report in early 2023 which said the efforts we've made so far on the climate have made a difference. We're no longer on the path to an apocalyptic extinction event of +4 degC or higher. It'll be hard work, but we can do it. My biggest regret is that I don't think our generation will ultimately be able to fix it. We're going to have to do what we can, but it'll be our children who are able to finally fix it. There's just not enough time left for us to do so in a human lifespan.
well said. i dont agree about the climate stuff, but the rest is 100% correct.
Substantially so, he is the worst president in US history. He can hug all the flags he likes, but at the end of the day he’s for Donald Trump not the United States
Buchanan was pretty terrible. I'm shocked that Trump was ranked even worse than him. He literally sat on the fence and let the country literally fall apart because he was afraid to do anything. Many think he could have avoided the civil war had he acted, but he was coward in the wrong place at the right time.
Trump sucks, easily in the bottom 5, and I could see an argument for him being the worst. But you have a big hill to climb to make the case for him to be substantially worse than Buchanan.
Ronnie Raygun sez....hold my beer.
This breaks rule 6 for advocating violence. Removed, 24 hour ban.
Both of those people are dead lmao
I get that you're quoting A Clockwork Orange, but out of context, this breaks rule 6 for advocating violence. Removed, 24 hour ban.
This breaks rule 6 for advocating violence. Removed, 24 hour ban.
Don't know US history- sounds like Buchanan did nothing, didn't avoid war. Trump actively went out if his way to cause division, push the country to civil war and enticed conflict from other states.
I guess it really depends on how it plays out. But, that being said, it wasn't so much that he did nothing but that he fence sat the entire time, just bidding his time so the next person could deal with it. . .and the country fell into a civil war that killed 2.5% of of the population of the country. That's a pretty bad outcome.
Remember Covid? We would have been better off if the buffoon would have sat on a fence, but no, he actively made it worse causing so many unnecessary deaths. He is by far the worst president ever and it's really not even a debate. He's sold classified information, caused an insurrection, and the list can literally go on for days. If he was president 100 years or so ago, he would have long been dead from being hung as a traitor.
Buchanan made the country worse through inaction, no doubt about it.
But Trump was by far the worst in how he actively tried to make the country worse for his benefit. Every other president has at least something they tried to do to improve the country. Trump only did things that benefited him personally.
Trump also made the world a worse place.
Spoiler: he's not done
Honestly Buchanan wasn't a great president, but I don't think it really would have mattered what actions Buchanan could have taken.
By the time he got into office civil war had all but been guaranteed as decades of kicking the can on the issue of slavery, combined with increasing resentment in the divide of the north and south culturally. Had created a powder keg that arguably was lit back during the start of bleeding Kansas years before he even became president.
And with how stubborn the south was on not letting go of slavery, well there really was no diplomatic solution by then. Hence kicking of the can all those years prior. Maybe he could have enacted decisions that delayed the war, but it would have only been a delay.
The only way civil war could have ever been prevented is if the founding fathers had told southerns to pound sand and outlaw slavery back during the signing of the constitution. That or maybe if the cotton gin had been invented a decade later
Can you briefly explain why we would have wanted to avoid the civil war? It freed the slaves and killed lots of slavers, didn’t it?
It also killed a lot of non-slavers and innocent civilians. Yes, slavery ending was a good thing, but there were possibly better ways for it to get done.
Lol, imagine being ranked as a worse president than William Henry Harrison who died immediately.
Hell he may be the best president
He sets the bar for break-even.
Didnt make things better or worse.
Judt gave a speech and then died.
Some would consoder that ideal.
I would expect WHH to be somewhere around 22nd or 23rd. By dying he is basically middle of the pack. Neither good nor bad, just a bit foolish. That can be forgiven since, as far as we know, he's the only one that paid the price.
The worst six in my opinion would be, in this order, #1 Wilson, #2 Jackson, #3 Reagan, #4 Nixon, #5 Polk, #6 Monroe.
Speedrun: President of the USA, Any%.
Bullshit! Everybody knows Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho is #1.
"... we got this guy not sure ..."
GO AWAY BATIN!
With Teddy Roosevelt being #2, Jefferson #3, and Monroe being #41, and Wilson #46.
Two things that make Trump the worst and arguably traitor to the US. Just so you know where I stand.
He literally try to overturn an election and remain king.
He piled on $8,400,000,000,000 to national debt. $2.5T came from his stupid tax cut law, which were only off set in the billions of increased tariffs, and about $2.3 from discretionary spending increase, plain old Republicans in charge and spending out the wazzu. Saving the last one $3.6T for COVID relief and laws, which everyone and their grandma pointed out the potential for fraud and abuse, but no guard rails were put in place and DOJ is merely chasing back millions in peanuts only because some fraudster was too stupid to keep their mouths shut.
Circumventing the Constitution and exacerbating the wealth inequality, were real acts of degrading the US, and at best just not giving a damn about the American people. Compared to all the other crap he did that were more performative, while below the office if the President, these two things have long term effect of weakening the county that I love. He's the worst President and the modern Republicans are only in for themselves.
I would argue the damage from stacking the Supreme Court with corrupt nut jobs may have the worst fall out in the end.
I think you should add in the incompetence in handling the whole covid fiasco.
I think calling it incompetence is being too nice.
For sure-- the cities got hit hardest early on, so what he saw initially was blue votes dying and just let it happen.
Sigh. I mean, we could go deep into the rabbit hole and talk about how he thought that he could kill off Blue State voters, but let's be charitable and just call him a nitwit and not a genocidal lunatic.
Sometimes, I'm just too nice.
https://www.businessinsider.com/kushner-covid-19-plan-maybe-axed-for-political-reasons-report-2020-7
Even without any of that, his public actions alone are enough.
The full story is just worse. :/
Its funny because blue states actually got the vaccine by choice.
Always relaxing watching your opponents eliminate their own ability to vote.
I was in NYC and the whole town closed up pretty fast. I'd be seeing news reports of people in the Red States partying like it was 1999 and knew they'd end up paying the price. I'm not happy people died, but I am mad at the fools who let it happen.
Im in NZ - we went into lockdown at 3 cases.
The unfortunate result of free will- the fools let it happen but each person out there had a choice as well. We chose to follow our lockdowns and eliminated it (the first time around) and got to get out again, total of something like 28 deaths before the vax came out.
And there are people in America today who will tell you that the lockdown didn't work. Thanks for your comment
You guys seem to forget that everyone was in panic mode when COVID started shutting everything down. Remember people actually dying over toilet paper? Remember 2020 George Floyd Riots and CHAZ taking over an entire city? Saying it's due to incompetence is grossly disregarding the events that took place. It was a complete shit show all around and NOBODY wanted to take accountability.
Can you link to anyone actually dying over toilet paper? Searched repeatedly and found nothing. Same with CHAZ taking over a city.
The riot I remember was when a neo-Nazi ran over an innocent woman in Charleston.
NOBODY else was President, and taking responsibility is in the job description
Finally, people died as the direct result of Trump tellign them to use unsafe treatments.
https://www.bbc.com/news/52012242
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/trump-endorsed-covid-treatment-may-have-killed-17000-people-study-finds/ar-AA1mx4cd
CHAZ did not take over Seattle…. Come on.
If only....
I think you should add in promoting the imperial interests of a very hostile power, Russia, to your list.
Everyone debating the outcomes but no one’s talking about the criteria the list is based on. What criteria they used has to be discussed before we can debate why we think it’s wrong or if a particular president should actually be here or there.
Just assume the criteria is not being a corrupt, lying, incompetent, democracy-hating puppet of belligerent foreign enemies.
I mean by what positive metric would how dumb ass even rank highly in?
Inherited wealth.
Don't tell me that isn't a positive in life.
Then Harrison would be in the middle of the list, not the bottom.
According to the Fox article it’s based on survey. I was hoping there was a more objective set of criteria based on policy, action, corruption. In which I still think trump would mark last but it just hits different having scholars asking people their opinions vs scholars sharing their own opinions and why.
And Trump was dead last.
Biden debuted at 14th.
Honestly Andrew Jackson ought to be way down at the bottom too
Guess whose portrait they had hung in the oval when Trump took over the job?
https://time.com/4649081/andrew-jackson-donald-trump-portrait/
If Trump gets a second term, things like Jacksons "Indian Removal Act" and other horrible acts will be a minor issue in comparison.
Jackson is pretty complicated. He did so much heinous shit, but he also did a lot to keep the south in line in the early 19th century. Middle if the pack is usually a fair place for Jackson.
I think genociding natives outweighs keeping the south in line enough to put him at the bottom
You’d think so, but here we are.
Yeah genocide and he has a personal body count from dueling while in office.
Jackson is not in the bottom but Harrison is? People need to read some history books. Dying 35 days into your presidency is worse than a genocide?
I've always thought that Harrison should be ranked much higher in these lists. If you equate his presidency with "doing absolutely nothing," then logically he should rank above all of the presidents who actively harmed the country/world. And there are quite a few of 'em.
Let's get tee shirts "Harrison was #1"
Confuse the shit out of people
George was pretty great.
Pete is my favorite Beatle.
Billy Preston is my favorite Beatle.
And don't tell me he wasn't a Beatle.
Pete was Best.
Drew was my favorite beetle.
The fact that he is still on our currency is insane enough
I wish I could like this more than once.
Putting Harrison in the bottom five is just mean. It wasn't his fault he died 20 days into his term.
Well, it was kind of his fault. But more the doctors' fault.
We were assigned a random president in high school, and I had to write a paper on his presidency. My paper was too short.
Same. I wrote a ton of pages about his work as governor and lost points bc it didn't cover his achievements as president. I asked the teacher if she could name one, and she told me that was my job. She was forced to retire after that year.
Wiki says the doc used cupping, blood letting, and gave him booze for pneumonia.
I wouldn't say Obama is a top 10 president but he was a good president.
Meanwhile Trump was objectively a terrible president - a venal, mercurial, criminal narcissist who sold out his allies and whose incompetence managed to kill hundreds of thousands of people during a pandemic and capped off his term with an insurrection. Not enough history has passed to judge exactly where he is in relation to some other terrible presidents but I reckon he'll be in the bottom 3 for sure.
I think it is less a judgment of how good Obama was buy rather an indictment of how bad (or inconsequential) most presidents have been.
That being said, the executive branch was really only as powerful was it is today rather recently. For the majority of the US existence it was just another bureaucratic office of government.
What are 10 presidents that are better than Obama, according to you?
Not the other guy but ill throw out a list of mine.
This aint an organized list, just those I considerr better than Obama. Also using Washington is a bit of an asspull on my part but I dont care.
Ok, thanks for sharing.
I'd be hard pressed to name 10 presidents that were better...
Edit: would love for someone to give me an actual list (with actual reasons for the non-obvious ones. The only person who even attempted so far didn't name 10, and included famous KKK supporter (member?) Woodrow Wilson, so...
I bet you would be.
Go ahead and do it then. I think we're both probably a bit too old for the whole "lul you can't name all of the presidents" shit, but hey if that's all ya got...
Or you can go ahead and do it. Make me look like an idiot.
And tell me why you think the non-obvious ones that you pull out of your ass deserve higher on the list.
You might not but there are plenty of lists that do and give their reasons. The likes of Lincoln, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Washington, Wilson, Kennedy, Reagan, Lyndon Johnson are frequently listed ahead of him and for some obvious reasons. Obama might squeak into the top 10 of some compilation lists, maybe higher if people only consider modern presidents.
Lol Wilson? Ummm...
Also, no way Reagan deserves to be ever close.
Argue with the scholars who made the lists, not me
I mean ok I will...
But I don't remember asking for 10 presidents that scholars think were better than Obama. That's literally their job, I'm sure they could have discussions on the topic for countless hours.
I was asking you, a normal American citizen in the year 2024, to name 9 presidents that were better than Obama (and the reasoning would be nice, but I know the caliber of discussion here, so I won't hold my breath).
Besides, if you're going to put a Wilson on the list, it should probably be Edith, as she essentially ran the county while good ol' KKK Woody was stroked out and incapacitated. Something the public wasn't fully aware of until much later. We have laws governing who assumes control in such situations, but I guess fuck all that shit, right? Good presidents don't lie about being incapacitated while their wife covers for them.
People like to attach Wilson's name/legacy to the League of Nations (which the US never joined, and ultimately failed), and tend to rank him highly entirely for this reason, ignoring all of the awful and racist shit he did. And yeah maybe that was par for the course at the time for rich old white dudes, but that's exactly why he doesn't stand out among his peers enough to be top 10 imo.
TL;DR - I wasn't looking for some scholar's list, but just a normal US citizen in (current year) for a top 10 that is actually well informed and well reasoned, and doesn't include Obama. I think most people would be hard pressed to do so.
At this point I'd be happy to take an average American that can name ten presidents that don't include: Trump, Bush, Obama, Biden, or Clinton.
Kinda funny that William Henry Harrison managed 41st place, considering he was only president for a few weeks in 1841. Considering the rankings were voted on by "self-styled experts", part of me wonders if they did that on purpose.
Also took me a moment to realize why the list includes 46 presidents (up to Biden) but only has 45 rankings. For anyone else who's wondering, it's because of Grover Cleveland's non-consecutive terms making him both the 22nd and 24th president.
Harrison wasn't around long enough to fuck anything up. In this list, that's helpful.
Yeah, but imagine how much higher Trump would have been in the kist if all he did as president was catch pneumonia and die?
If he did that in his first term I might consider voting for him later this year
They can freak out all they like. Obama was better.
Pierce and Buchanan are always bottom tier. One laid groundwork for the Civil War and the other lit the match ensuring Lincoln would, if elected President, increase hostilities.
Pierce at 42 should in my mind be 44 if not 43. Trump coming in at 45 seems about right, maybe 44 if I’m being generous.
But Trump literally tried overthrowing the US government. There’s just no way history is going to be kind to him. There’s nothing that can be done, no one can go back and undo the past.
Dude’s lasting legacy is going to be defined by pretty much, “Oh yeah, he attempted to overthrow the US government. And he was so powerful and charismatic, he got nominated to run for President again to get a second swipe at overthrowing the Government.”
If it makes them feel better... Trump makes the top 10 in my lifetime...
Sort of amazed you have Reagan so high
Reagan gets a pass for not fucking up Glasnost.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasnost
Surely his denial and bungling of AIDS, the abject hypocrisy of his drug policy while profiting from the sale of drugs during Iran-Contra knock him right back down that list?
This B movie actor had no business running any country, never mind a murderously hegemonic one. They badly need someone with good values and personal integrity.
Also, why is Ford so far below Reagan? Other than pardoning Nixon, which was admittedly awful, he didn't do shit as president. Why is Clinton above Carter? The list is certainly not one I would agree with. In fact, I would put Reagan below Trump. We wouldn't have Trump if it wasn't for Reagan.
Clinton is a villain, a well known sexual predator. He was sustained by a psychopathic charisma but his record in office is appalling. Hitchens made a tidy hatchet job in his book, No One Left to Lie To. Give me Carter any day of the week, people still respect that guy. The mendacious Clinton's are money grubbing megalomaniacs and should never be anywhere near the levers of power.
Which is why they kicked him out in favor of Jimmy Carter.... Er wait...
His campaign conspired to prevent the release of American hostages so he could get some political gain. Using American citizens as political pawns is unimaginable to me.
Uh, um....................... you must feel quite overwhelmed since 2016, then.
Seems like an understatement.
Gives the impression they're all in the top 10 so it's doing its job
That's... Not what we call a statistically valid sample size.
Note, that is not 154 random people on the street. That is 154 US academics specializing in presidential politics, a much smaller total population.
That's not the way that I read that. If that's true, then the phrasing was very unclear.
I did not read this article in particular, but the actual report: http://www.brandonrottinghaus.com/uploads/1/0/8/7/108798321/presidential_greatness_white_paper_2024.pdf
Its so tiresome, because none of this shit is going to matter once the next Big Hurricane wipes a few more Gulf Coast cities off the map. The "Best/Worst" Presidents are all yet to be written, not set in stone by some dipshit Frank Luntz poll of 50-something ivy league academics.
People are going to be looking back at the Obama/Trump/Biden Era as absolutely utopian, with the way our economy is pitched. Its the Kamala Harris / Greg Abbott / Beyonce / Tucker Carlson presidencies you're really going to have feelings about over the next thirty years.
TBH, once the really hard consequences of climate change hit--blue ocean events, mass die-offs of fish across all oceans, dust bowls in regions that are currently bread baskets, etc.--I don't think that most people are going to be worrying about a president at all.
If humanity is lucky, we'll all die from a previously unclassified pathogen from melting arctic ice. If humanity is unlucky, it's going to be death from a century of famines.
We worried quite a bit about the President during the last 30s-era Dust Bowl.
Its not the end of the world. Its the end of a particular way of life. As the old world dies, the new world struggles to be born.
No, it's not the end of the world; the planet will shrug humanity off and continue without us just fine. The world will do just fine, right up until the sun turns into a red giant and the expanding corona envelops this planet and burns it away, in a few billion years.
It will probably be the end of civilization as we understand it though.
More primitive civilizations have endured more desperate conditions.
We are not more primitive civilizations. We have culturally forgotten most of the things that are absolutely necessary for more primitive cultures to survive, and there are not nearly enough people have have any of these cultural memories to pass knowledge on at a meaningful scale. Tribes in sub-Saharan Africa might be able to survive, if climate change doesn't wipe out their prey animals. Same with certain tribes in Brazil, assuming that temperatures don't go past 95F for wet-bulb temperatures in the Amazon.
But we're not them.
Developing large agriculture surpluses and potable water reserves, while expanding safe arteries of travel and maintaining peaceful coexistence with our surrounding neighbors?
Global literacy is at a historical peak. And methods of archiving/distributing information have never been more diverse or prolific.
They'll be some of the first to go, precisely because they don't have industrial agriculture or advanced pluming and A/C.
Yeah, no on this sorry this article is bullshit... Trump is a bad guy and was a bad president but Andrew Jackson ordered the Trail of Tears and forced over a hundred thousand people to walk into desert concentration camps.
I'm told that a hundred thousand people is [checks notes] less than hundreds of thousands. It's a shock to me too, but the math does check out.
Not sure what your point is, at the time this was literally all of them. The trail of tears totally erased many cultures to where they never recovered and was a total and complete genocide.
Pandemic
Drop the [check notes] cliche. It's so overused. The rest of your comment is on point.
I side with you, but we should also put things in context.
What communication technologies were available back then?
And how large was the U.S. population?
This is absolutely unprecedented for Fox News to publish. Normally they're praising the Republican Party so hard that you could see their political bias from space. Has Hell frozen over or is this some kind of editorial fuck-up that's going to make heads roll?
Imagine admitting that Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States, was the sixth-best president in US history.
They're reporting on the results of someone else's survey; so they can protest indignantly.
Someone pointed out that they worded their reporting on the article in a way that seems like Trump and Reagan were in the top ten right behind Obama. I'm sure they'll find a way to twist it in their favor.
They deal in fear and anger
why in the unholy shitting fuck is MAGA considered a person
Because they're all just clones
The cool thing about a propagandized population is it creates something akin to a hivemind people. All you really have to do is determine whether or not X person has fallen victim to a certain flavor of propaganda, and it's a decent indicator of whether or not that person believes several other falsehoods and behaves in accordance with actions laid out by the source of the propaganda. MAGA is a solid example of a propagandized people who behave and believe in very predictable ways: They skew alt-right, believe Trump is good for the country, range from racially apathetic to completely racist, champion capitalism and billionaires, are unable to be swayed by new information that runs counter to their established narrative, are aggressively white and Christian, and they generally align with Republican politicians across the board, as long as those politicians are in the same realm of insanity that Trump inhabits. MAGA is a philosophy born and raised by bad faith propaganda.
i would stop using the tagline they picked out and instead just call them right wing fascists
Doesn't roll off the tongue quite as easy.
and yet republicants are still lining-up to lovingly change his diaper and vote for him.
Hilariously, republicans in this survey ranked Biden significantly higher than trump. Makes me think these might actually be well-informed people!
And buy his $18 sneakers
Trump is #1.... In felonies.
Trump increased the average felony charges per president to 2.
Trump: 96
All other previous presidents combined: 0
These results are interesting, though the article does note that the overall results seem to map along party lines for mote contemporary presdients (with notable exceptions, like Clinton.) In case anyone wonders, the polling pool was:
So, not a general survey in case anyone wonders.
Edit: I do wonder how balanced this survey was, though... if Obama was 6th and 15h and Biden was 13th among Democrats and 30th among Republicans, and nonetheless 14th overall, it does suggest that the poll was heavily skewed toward Democratic respondents. Nothing wrong with that, just food for thought.
Wait, so you're saying the scholars... the people who actually study things and know what they are talking about... skew towards a favorable view of democratic policies??? That's weird, must be a conspiracy.
Not as such. I'm saying exactly what I said... that there's a strong democratic skew in this survey, which is not immediately apparent in the story. That is valuable information for anyone wanting to understand the results... not so much for someone looking to "hur hur" over the performance of the other.
There's a lot that don't really make sense other than a heavier democrat bias. Bush Sr being well above Jr also doesn't really make sense. There also seems to be a very heavy recency bias, Clinton should probably be the highest rated president from the last 30 years and likely not in the top 10.
Nixon is a vastly misremembered president, especially when it comes to US-native relations. He was a mixed bag in most ways - though he was deeply racist against African Americans.
That line is named Roger Stone...
The man with a Nixon Tattoo on his back, and who was coordinating Jan 6th with Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
Roger Stone looks like a 90s movie evil villain. Especially when he wears black.
Nixon and Kissinger sabotaged the 1968 Paris Peace Talks so that Nixon would have an advantage in the election. He then massively increased the US presence in Vietnam, while allowing Kissinger free rein to order the carpet bombing of Cambodian villages. Often overruling generals that said there were no military targets in said Cambodian villages.
Nixon then started the War on Drugs because he saw hippies and black people as his biggest detractors, but because he knew he couldn't make it illegal to be a hippy or black, he went after the drugs traditionally favored by both groups, in effect, making it illegal to be a hippy or black.
There's so much more...
Rupert obviously enjoys trolling the rubes from time to time.
I wonder what Trump plans to do about it, other than whinge. Get reelected by abandoning Fox News and using tRuTh sOcIaL instead?
Someone just tell Donny that this scoring was like golf. Lowest score wins. Winning!!!
Truth hurts.
Maga Cult
Seems very on-brand for that bunch. They are always angry.
I think this is a little exaggerated. Trump fits in to the do-nothing Republicans Harding/Coolidge/Hoover, maybe at the bottom of those because of the insurrection. I just don't think there's a real argument for worst president ever.
There's recency bias, and the bias of the surveyed historians being in the college-educated group which has moved the fastest against Trump. That explains why Reagan is still top half but Trump is absolute bottom.
You don't think literally trying to overthrow the government qualifies him for below average?
Below average yes. Worst of all time no. For all the evils of American history including all sorts and quantities of deaths, there was a president egging them on, perpetrating them himself, or at the least looking away.
Agreed on the last sentence, but most of those guys also did a lot of positive things. Like Nixon did some terrible things, and likely would have been removed from office if he hadn't resigned, but he also negotiated significant arms reductions with the Soviet Union, pulled out of Vietnam, negotiated trade with China, and other positive things. I think historians do some offsetting of good and bad. Trump didn't have a lot of good. I'm not sure Andrew Jackson has much good to balance his significant atrocities, but if be okay with him in last place and Trump next.
You might want to read more about this. He prolonged the war 6 more years. More of war happened under him than the previous admins combined.
Oh, oops, that's a bad screw up on my part. I remember that he was pretty vocal about wanting to pull out, but I was pretty young and apparently my history is poor. Thanks for the clarification, I'll make a correction.
My broader point stands though: some of the presidents who did bad things also did good things, and I think historians weigh both.
Edit: reading about it more, in not sure my original post was too far off. He did work pretty hard to end it and personally believed it had to be ended and quickly. Yes, he was thwarted for some time, and he did some pretty awful things in the name of ending it. He got an agreement signed and pulled US troops out, but the Vietnamese didn't abide by the agreement and kept fighting. So I guess what I remembered is he ended it for the US. I said he pulled out, not that he ended the war.
So who do you think is the worst President ever?
I mean, it's gotta be Reagan, right?
Caused permanent economic fuckery people are still being victimized by today. Lied about every one of his campaign promises. Actively supported overseas terrorism. Hugely expanded the oil and gas industry at a time where it was still possible to control it and we already knew about how devastating climate change (then global warming) may end up being. Broke the back of organized labor in a way that it still hasn't and may never fully recover from. His views on civil rights were so regressive and heinous he actually had vetos overridden by congress on the subject -- he even wanted to continue supporting apartheid south africa. Double and tripled-down on the war on drugs and is probably more responsible for its expansion than any other president.
And I'm not even getting into his responses to GRIND/AIDS. Or the Iran/Contra affair.
Fuck I am so glad he's dead in the ground. Wish his assassination attempt hadn't been an attempt.
One of the problems with lists that rate "greatness" is indeed recency bias. It takes a generation or two before a President's legacy is understood. Reagan's legacy is still volatile. Will Iran-Contra, voodoo economics, and the War on Drugs be considered significant in 50 or 100 years? Hard to know.
If Trump loses the next election and MAGA burns out, Trump will be remembered as a buffoon who lamely and unsuccessfully tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. If his actions eventually lead to the overthrow of the US constitutional order, then he'll either be considered the Second Coming or worse than Hitler, depending on your perspective. I think/hope the US constitutional order will survive Trump and that he will be largely forgotten by history, like other lesser known Presidents.
Buchanan was the last pro-slavery president, who made Kansas a slave state and helped cause the Civil War(Jan 6th but way worse), exacerbated the Panic of 1857 by not providing any stimulus (Covid recession recieved quite a bit of stimulus during the Trump admin), he was also apparently really corrupt and didn't do anything to help normal people (maybe the same in relation to their day but corruption was way easier and more widespread in Buchanan's time). Pretty common choice for worst president. Inarguably worse than Trump I'd say.