Former President Donald Trump has been ranked last, 45th out of 45, in a survey ranking all US presidents on their performance in office. Members of the American Political Science Association gave a score of 0–100 to each POTUS, and the overall ranking was based on the average of scores given. Incumbent President Joe Biden was ranked 14th.
Needless to say, that is a ridiculous result.
As an incumbent, President Biden presided over a stock market crash in 2022, runaway inflation, gas price hikes, the botched withdrawal of Afghanistan, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Hamas attack on Israel, and the criminal prosecution of his political rival. Meanwhile, a special counsel investigation into his mishandling of classified information found that he has memory issues, and he is not even able to recall basic details of his life, such as when he was Vice President or when his son died. He is often prone to misspeak, at times talking gibberish in public—a remarkable lack of charisma for someone in his position.
As a result, President Biden has a historically low approval rating, often dipping below 40 per cent. He is also trailing the supposed worst president in US history in media company RealClearPolitics’ polling aggregate.
President Trump was in charge when the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd riots broke out in the US, both highly destructive events in the lives of Americans, but still got more votes than any incumbent president in US history in the 2020 election, 74.2 million.
Reputable historians tend to avoid evaluating recent presidencies, given that not enough time has passed to give them adequate historical context.
Ranking a widely unpopular incumbent president in the top third of all presidents is ridiculous on its own,
and should disqualify the list to be taken seriously by any reasonable observer. The most it does is discredit the supposed expertise of the members of the American Political Science Association.
This might be the wildest thing you’ll see today. A group of “historians” have ranked President Trump as the worst president in American history. Meanwhile, Biden comes in at 14.
— Javon A. Price 🇺🇸 (@JavonAPrice) February 19, 2024
Like bruh, you can’t be serious 😂
Source: @axios pic.twitter.com/eh8vlQVSdh
Who Is the Real Worst President in American History?
By ranking Donald Trump last, the supposed ‘presidential experts’ also trivialized major, catastrophic events in American history that caused great suffering to the people.
Leading up to the Civil War, multiple presidents made highly detrimental decisions that led to the armed conflict between the North and the slave-owning South—which, in turn, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
President Franklin Pierce from the Democratic Party signed into law the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, allowing for the ‘popular sovereignty’ of the locals to decide whether or not the new states of Kansas and Nebraska would be admitted to the Union as free or slave states. He thus did away with the traditions of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The result was a period known in American history as ‘bleeding Kansas,’ when abolitionist and pro-slavery mobs routinely engaged in violence against each other in the territory.
President James Buchanan, another Democrat, supported the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court, which ruled that African Americans could never become American citizens. He was still in office when the first Southern states started to secede from the Union after Republican Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, but did nothing to stop it. In fact, his Secretary of War John B. Floyd started to relocate weapons to federal armouries in the Southern states to help the secessionists in the anticipated armed rebellion.
Both of these presidents were widely unpopular already during their time in office and were never even in contention for the party’s nomination for a potential reelection campaign.
Andrew Johnson was a Democrat on Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 National Union Party ticket. He was the only Southern Democrat in the Senate who stayed loyal to the Union after the succession crisis, which earned him the VP spot in Lincoln’s reelection campaign. They won, but barely more than a month into his second term, President Lincoln was assassinated, leaving Johnson in charge.
Johnson’s Southern sympathies led him to quickly shut down federal programmes helping the newly freed African slaves. He also let Southern terrorists such as the Ku Klux Klan freely terrorize the freed black men in the South after the Civil War, and was lenient in punishing the rebels. Given that he was a Democrat heading a Republican administration, Johnson was involved in plenty of infighting as well. He was the first president ever to be impeached and only survived conviction in the Senate by a single vote.
As for presidents serving in the post-Civil War era, Republican Herbert Hoover also has a reasonable ‘claim’ to the not-so-glorious title of worst president ever. He presided over the start of the Great Depression and did little to mitigate the crisis, and when he did do something, it ended up making things even worse, such as his Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act.
Meanwhile, Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s administration oversaw the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I, which had disastrous consequences in the world a decade later—it directly led to the rise of the Third Reich in Germany. Wilson himself was horrible in race relations: he segregated the federal government offices in Washington DC, and the Ku Klux Klan rose back to prominence in the South under his watch as well.
President Wilson is the only two-term president who could be reasonably considered the worst POTUS ever.
Although his 1916 reelection campaign slogan was ‘He Kept Us Out of War,’ a month into his second term he entered the United States into World War I. Using wartime as an excuse, he also passed the Sedition Act, imprisoning his critics and going against the ideals of free speech.
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