Historians agree: Donald Trump is the worst US president ever. Here’s why
The rioters screamed bloody murder as they went from door to door.
The offices were thankfully empty as the mob ransacked them—they rifled through filing cabinets, one reportedly stole a laptop, another stupidly took a selfie with his feet up on the desk, and yet another gleefully posed as he carried a lectern away.
As thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, they chanted, “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!”
They screamed, “Where is that c*nt Nancy Pelosi?”
They yelled, bewildered when they reached the empty House floor, “Where the f*ck are they?”
Outside the Capitol, a makeshift noose swayed slightly in the winter wind. This was where they were going to hang Vice President Mike Pence because President Donald Trump had implied that if Pence didn’t overturn the election results he was a traitor.
Hours before, outside the White House, Trump and his son Donald Jr. fired up an already angry crowd, crazed by conspiracy theories.
Trump crossed the rubicon on Jan. 6, when he wouldn’t allow for a peaceful transfer of power.
Trump said, “All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing…And after this, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, and I’ll be there with you.”
The crowd did walk toward the US Capitol, turning into a mob the closer they got, some of them armed and some carrying restraints—while Trump and his children got into their bullet-proof limos and went back to the White House to watch TV.
Trump’s lies that the election was stolen from him were amplified and repeated on Twitter until even cold, hard facts didn’t get through to his followers. When news reporters at the White House and Capitol told protesters that Trump had filed about 60 lawsuits in contested states and lost in the courts, they turned away or simply yelled, “Fake news!”
As the mob stormed the Capitol and waved the Confederate flag, the world watched in disbelief and asked if this was really America—or was it some poor, ignorant banana republic with a crazy dictator unwilling to leave office?
This is the day that caused Donald Trump to go from the worst US president in modern history to the absolute worst in all of US history.
Bar none.
How US presidents are ranked
It wasn’t until 1948 that US presidents were ranked. Harvard University historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, upon the request of Life magazine, asked 55 historians to rank the presidents from best to worst.
“Schlesinger’s survey found that historians rated Abraham Lincoln, who led the US through the Civil War, the best president of all time. George Washington, the nation’s first president, was ranked number two. The most recent ex-president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, came in third thanks to his success steering the country through the Great Depression and World War II, as well as his ambitious New Deal program,” writes Matthew Knott in The Sydney Morning Herald.
Since that first ranking 73 years ago, these three presidents consistently score high and land on top no matter who is doing the survey.
The last three always at the bottom are Warren Harding for his spectacular ineptitude (president from March 1921 to Aug. 1923); Andrew Johnson for his opposition to federally granted the rights of African Americans and ineffectiveness (April 1865 to March 1869); and James Buchanan for his inaction over the issue of slavery and not “stopping the Southern states from seceding in the lead-up to the Civil War” (March 1857 to March 1861).
That is, until Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump incited a mob to overturn an election after he had already lost 60 lawsuits in several states.
The scandals that rocked some of the worst presidents before Trump seem minor faux pas compared to his which include, among many, his relationship with Putin and Russia; bribery and affair with porn star Stormy Daniels; pressuring the Ukraine president to open an investigation on Biden’s son Hunter; sexual assault allegations; starting or escalating fights with Iran and NoKor; pandering to white supremacists; his defense of the Confederate flag; and his legacy of lies and weaponizing conspiracy theories on Twitter.
The Siena College Research Institute in New York has been conducting presidential surveys since 1982. It asks scholars and experts to assess presidents on categories such as integrity, economic policies, intelligence, willingness to take risks, foreign policies and their relationship with Congress.
The experts Siena consulted ranked Trump last among US presidents in integrity and intelligence.
Integrity? Trump once boasted, “When you’re a star, you can do anything. Grab women by the pussy.”
“Timothy Naftali, the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, says: ‘After his first impeachment and dereliction of duty during the COVID crisis Trump was already America's worst modern president. I think, as a result of his responsibility for the insurrection on Jan. 6, he has edged out James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson as the worst US president ever.’”
Honesty? In June 2020, he claimed on Twitter that he had “done more for the black community than any president since Abraham Lincoln.” Yet just three years earlier, in August 2017, in the aftermath of the Charlottesville tragedy where a woman was killed protesting an alt-right rally, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.”
How could there be fine people among white supremacists carrying tiki torches and the Confederate flag as if to a hanging? In 2017!
By this time, Trump was already at the bottom three or five of presidential rankings. But it wasn’t until the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection that the verdict by historians (not politicians) became seemingly unanimous: Trump is the Worst US President Ever.
According to writer Matthew Knott, “Top historians and political scientists told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that Trump's efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election, on top of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, have cemented his place as America’s worst president.”
On Jan. 20, historian and Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley told Anderson Cooper on CNN that Trump was at the “bottom of the barrel,” citing the insurrection, the COVID death toll, the bizarre press briefing where he suggested injecting bleach might kill the coronavirus, his lies on social media, among mnay other things.
Another historian said, “Trump crossed the rubicon on Jan. 6, when he wouldn’t allow for a peaceful transfer of power.”
And Richard Nixon, who was complicit in the Watergate Hotel break-in? He’s only the 29th worst president in the Siena rankings.
Can Trump ever go up in ranking after leaving office like Harry Truman, whose ranking improved “thanks to his foreign policy innovations such as the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild western Europe after WWII, and the creation of NATO. Most expert surveys now rank him in the top 10 presidents of all time.”
Historians agree on the answer to that question, too. Not likely.