For the sixth time since 1982 the Siena College Research Institute surveyed scholars to rank US presidents from best to worst. The rankings occur only after a new president has at least one full year in office and because of their lack of time in the job, the sitting president is usually ranked in the middle of the pack. In 2017 157 historians and political science scholars to ranked Donald J. Trump the third worst president in American History using the 20 different categories specified by the institute. Only Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan were ranked lower.
According to a 2/12/19 USA Today article on these rankings: “For the first time in the survey’s history, George Washington was ranked the greatest president, unseating Franklin Roosevelt, who had topped every previous ranking. Overall, the top five has remained unchanged with Washington, Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson. Barack Obama dropped two spots to the 17th greatest president, while George W. Bush climbed six spots to 33rd. Bill Clinton went from 13th to 15th and Ronald Reagan climbed from 18th to13th place.”
However, I firmly believe that an excellent case can be made to rank Trump in the 44th and last spot. (While Trump is viewed as the 45th president, we sometimes forget that Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms so only 44 men have actually occupied the office.) To really appreciate how low Trump should actually be ranked today, it is necessary to take a good look at his competition for the lowest spots in the many ranking:
Andrew Johnson has often ranked as the worst President in American history in many of these polls. Abraham Lincoln selected Johnson as his running mate when he ran for reelection in late 1864. Johnson from Tennessee had been the only Southern Senator to remain loyal to the Union when the Civil War broke out. Before the war he did his best to convince the Southern states not to succeed. In April of 1865, five days after the war ended with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln was assassinated, and Johnson assumed the mantel of the presidency for most of what would have been Lincoln’s second term.
Johnson was intent in welcoming the South back into the Union and cementing the country back together again. Perhaps because of his Southern roots he was lenient with the South and granted amnesty to those who had fought against the North, He also allowed the Southern states to again form their state governments. However, many of those governments came to be populated by ex-Confederate officials and they often passed laws meant to “control” their newly freed black populations. Johnson was opposed by the self-named “Radical Republicans” in his own party who had gained control of Congress. While they considered themselves the champions of the former slaves, it often appeared that their primary goal was to punish the South as much as possible.
Probably Johnson’s greatest sin according to historians was to advise the Southern states to not ratify the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which granted full citizenship to the black population. The battle between the President and the Radical Republicans in Congress continued to intensify and it ended with Johnson being impeachment by the House of Representatives for firing one of his cabinet members who disagreed with him. He avoided conviction and ouster from office by one vote in the Senate.
When viewed from our historical perspective, there seems to be ample reason for Johnson’s low presidential ranking. However, I have often wondered how Lincoln, who has always been judged among our five greatest presidents, would have handled the same situation had he lived. By all accounts he was all about restoring the Union to normalcy as quickly as possible and would have probably resisted the urging of the Radical Republicans to punish the South.
We should also consider the lasting effects of the policies of the Radical Republicans, Johnson’s bitter enemies, which were were put in place after Johnson’s term in office ended. After Ulysses S. Grant was elected president he supported the objectives of the Radical Republicans. The harsh policies of “reconstruction” inflicted on the South, which lasted until 1877, left a repugnance of the federal government that lingers still in the hearts of too many Southerners even today.
Andrew Johnson, an inept politician, in my view was accidental president who inherited the job at just the wrong time. Perhaps Lincoln, who the Radical Republican also viewed as an enemy, would have done a better job with the cards Johnson was dealt had he lived. His statue in the country would have probably allowed him to better control of the trouble makers in Congress. But maybe not. The Radical Republicans were “true believers” of the first order and many of them viewed the Civil War as God’s punishment for sin of slavery. Such people are not easily dissuaded from what they believe are God’s ordained goals. By today’s standards, they would be judged to being totally morally right, but their methods further divided the country that at a time that it was much in need of healing.
James Buchanan, who proceeded Lincoln in the White House has also been regularly ranked at or near the bottom of the presidential pack. Before being elected President in 1857, Buchanan served as Ambassador to Russia under Andrew Jackson, Senator from his home state of Pennsylvania, and Secretary of State under James Polk. Later he was appointed Minister to Great Britain by Franklin Pierce.
In 1846 Buchanan joined the Southerners to successfully block the Wilmot Proviso which would have forbidden slavery in the newly acquired Western territories and he backed the Compromise of 1850 which allowed California to join the Union as a free state in exchange for allowing the territories applying for statehood in the future to decide for themselves whether they would allow slavery or not. While Buchanan tried his best throughout his political career, and especially as President, to appear to remain neutral on the slavery issue, he was widely known to be a “doughface”, a less than polite term used to describe a northerner who was a southern sympathizer.
In his presidential campaign Buchanan ran on a platform which supported the notion that territories applying to be admitted to the union should be able to decide for themselves whether they should be admitted as slave or free states. His primary opponent, John Fremont of California, the first Republican candidate for president, strongly advocated that all states admitted in the future should be free of slavery. So it wasn’t like the country didn’t know what it was getting when Buchanan won the election.
By the time Buchanan entered the White House the country was racing headlong towards civil war and he is today widely criticized for not doing enough to prevent it. He tried to underplay the slavery issue which was tearing the country apart in an effort to maintain peace between the abolitionists and the advocates of the South. However, historians widely fault him for supporting the faction who were fighting to admit Kansas as a slave state, a position which infuriated many who opposed slavery in the North.
When the election of Lincoln, the candidate of the abolitionist Republican Party, caused South Carolina to decide to succeed from the Union, six other Southern states quickly followed suit while Buchanan was still in office. Historians also often fault Buchanan for not doing enough to prevent South Carolina from succeeding, though what more he could have done at that point remains unclear. Buchanan was not nominated by the Democratic party for reelection and was more than pleased turn over a country in absolute turmoil to Lincoln. On inauguration day he was quoted as telling his successor, “Sir, if you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man indeed.”
One could view Buchanan as a man who simply was incapable of handling what was almost impossible job and there is no doubt that he bungled it. Perhaps a much more capable man could have held the Union together, but let’s not forget it was the election of one of our most capable presidents, Abraham Lincoln, which was the event that lead to the succession of many of the Southern states and later the foundation of the Confederacy.
Franklin Pierce is also among the presidents who normally fall near the bottom ofl rankings. He was yet another of the pre-Civil War presidents. He was charismatic and well liked, but considered indecisive during his presidency. Some believe he might have been become a bit unstable after he and his family were involved in a railroad accident within days of becoming President. He and his wife were unhurt, but his only remaining child, eleven year old son Benny, was killed before their eyes. The couple had previously lost two other children to disease.
Pierce’s support of expanding US territorial interests were viewed with suspicion by many in the North as providing opportunities for the South increase the number of slave states, though that was probably not his intent. His biggest mistake was allowing himself to be bullied by powerful Senator Steven Douglas of his own party into supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act which allowed those two territories to decide for themselves whether they would enter the union as free or slave states. Ruffians streamed into Kansas from nearby slave states and soon bloody battles broke out between pro-slavery and anti-slavery contingents. Pierce sent in federal troops to restore order, but “Bleeding Kansas” caused his Democratic Party to deny him its nomination for a second term.
Millard Fillmore was yet another of the pre-Civil War presidents who owes his low rankings to manner in which he dealt with this very difficult period of our history. He was a relative unknown chosen by the popular war hero Zachary Taylor to be his vice president. When Taylor died in mid-1850 after only a year in the White House, Fillmore succeeded him. While he personally didn’t approve of slavery, Fillmore believed the it was protected by the Constitution and that the entire economy of the South, which at the time was responsible for 60% of the country’s exports, would collapse if slavery was abolished.
At the time the issue of slavery was beginning to pull the nation apart. President Fillmore enthusiastically supported the Compromise of 1850 which he believed would put the issue to rest forever. By most accounts it delayed the Civil War for ten years, but looking back through their current prospectives, many historians now believe that with the Compromise of 1850 bought peace at a morally unconscionable price. They fault Fillmore for viewing slavery as a political rather than a moral issue.
Warren G. Harding is another president who is consistently ranked near the bottom of the presidential lists. He a gregarious soul, someone who was liked everyone who knew him . He was elected after World War I in 1921 in a landslide victory, but only served for a year and a half before dying of an apparent heart attack in the summer of 1923 at the age of 56. Historians point to scandals as the prime reasons for Harding’s low rankings. Two years before he was elected President he had an affair with a young woman (not his wife) which resulted in the birth of a child. While he was running for president he was being blackmailed by another of his mistress and her husband.
While some of those he appointed to his cabinet were outstanding men, Harding also surrounded himself with associates with questionable characters. Albert Fall, Hardin’s Secretary of the Interior, took bribes in exchange for renting public lands to oil companies in what became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. Other members of his team also took bribes and embezzled money from the government. However none of Harding’s extramarital indiscretions or his administration’s financial scandals came to light until after death, so he was very popular during his days in the White House.
While Harding was obviously a philanderer, something that he had in common with several of our presidents, he was not known for disrespecting women. He was also an honest man who was apparently unable to properly gauge the characters of others.
Another President often ranked by historians as among the country’s worst is William Henry Harrison. He was a war hero who only served as president for 31 days. Harrison’s biggest mistake was refusing to wear a coat or a hat during his overly long (two hour) inaugural address on a very cold and windy day. He caught as cold which turned into pneumonia and he died a month later on April 4, 1841. Thus he departed the highest office in the land with no legacy at all which is the cause of his low rankings.
That completes our rouge’s gallery of the men who are generally considered to be among the worse presidents in our nation’s history. However, there is a new candidate for that ignominious title, Donald J. Trump. How does Trump compare to these men who heretofore occupied the lowest rungs of the presidential rankings? Apparently not very well.
Trump didn’t fare well in the Presidents & Executive Politics Presidential Greatness survey initiated professors Justin S. Vaughn (Boise State University) and Brandon Rottinghaus (University of Houston). It was another recent presidential ranking surveys. The 170 members of the of the Presidents and Executive Politics section of the American Political Science Association who completed the survey ranked Trump dead last. Even the survey respondents who self- identified as Republicans ranked him third to last behind behind William Henry Harrison and James Buchanan.
All of this begs the question, where we, the American public, should rank Trump. After reviewing the records of those men who have traditionally competed for the dubious honor of Worst President in American History and comparing them to that of the present occupant of the White House, one has to conclude that Donald J. Trump is in fact the worst of president of them all.
It is no accident that four of the men most commonly ranked near the bottom of the presidential barrel were all presidents during the period immediately before and immediately after the Civil War, the greatest tragedy in our history. From our current perspective, it is very easy to criticize the tenures in Oval Office of Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce and Millard Fillmore.
Since we now understand that slavery as practiced in this country before the Civil to be among the most inhuman institutions ever devised by man, we properly look with disdain at those in power who tolerated both the practice and those who owned or had owned slaves and in some cases even advanced their cause. It is difficult therefore to put ourselves in the perspective of the people of the time who viewed slavery not only as moral issue, but also as a political and economic issue with enormous implications. In some ways it was like the abortion issue of our time with people who were otherwise decent supporting both sides, only it was one hundred times more explosive. In this respect the views of Johnson, Buchanan, Pierce and Fillmore were not very different from many Americans of their time.
Each of these four men inherited very difficult situations when they entered the White House and the consensus is that they failed miserably. Could even the most able of politicians of their time performed noticeably better in their places? We can never be sure, but it is clear that those four men were not up to the job. However, this we do know. They harbored no evil intent. They did what they did with the best of intentions, however misguided they may have been. Now imagine if the divisive and self-serving Donald J. Trump had instead been put in each of their situations. Is there any doubt that he would have used the conflicts of the time to his own political advantage and taken pleasure in widening the divisions in the country which already existed?
On the other hand it is totally unfair to compare Trump to William Henry Harrison. Harrison’s only sin was getting sick and dying in office before he could do any good or harm.
There are some similarities between Warren Harding and Trump. Both were revealed to be unfaithful to their wives and paid hush money during their presidential campaigns to keep the affairs from going public, though Trump’s efforts broke federal law while Harding’s did not. Also Harding was not a serial abuser who was proud of his ability to sexually assault women and get away with it. Both Harding and Trump appointed individuals to cabinet positions and other government jobs who abused the system for their own enrichment. However, neither Harding nor his appointees sought the help of an adversarial foreign power for help in his election.
In addition, during his short tenure in the White House, Harding was an extremely popular president who sought to reinvigorate the country after the devastating sacrifices required by World War I. On the other hand Trump has only sought political gain by pitting factions of Americans against each other while continuing to stir up discontent and preside over the most unstable administration in our lifetimes.
Also none of the other six former presidents generally considered among the country’s worse were involved in obstruction of justice. They didn’t lie to the American public every day and continually call their opponents childish names. They didn’t break treaties which our government had previously entered into in good faith. They didn’t drive away our closest allies while embracing dictators. They didn’t side with the leader of an enemy power while discounting the evidence developed by their own people. They didn’t make and announce important domestic and foreign policy decisions without at least consulting with the subject matter experts in their own administrations. They didn’t often have to walk back those decisions or stubbornly cling to them even after they discovered their mistakes. They didn’t continually overstep the limits of presidential power and seek to gain dominance over the other two coequal branches of our government for purely political purposes.
With 16 additional investigations underway which will surely will touch every aspect Trump’s life, who knows what other unpleasant secrets are yet to be revealed. Meanwhile, there is no question in my mind that future historians will rightly assign Trump’s administration to the trash heap of history and rank him as the worst president ever to serve in the White House. However, with Senate Republicans unable to overcome their fear of Trump’s rabid supporters, I am more concerned about the harm our narcissistic president may inflect over the next 21 months than I am about the disastrous things he has already done in the past.
Cajun 4/28/2019