Worst US Presidents

He tried to stage a coup.

And he was the first president in US history to be impeached TWICE.

It's incredible how shielded from reality some people have become.

Trump suggested using high-intensity light to cure covid. I think he definitely ranks high on the stupid meter.

As I commented on my own quiz on this subject, I feel like the bar set by William Henry Harrison, who got sick after his inaugural and died a month into his term and did basically nothing, is such that... to be worse than him you would have to be actively harming the country. WHH's position among presidents is essentially the null position. It's the same as if you would just leave the office vacant. That's the impact he had on the country.

So it's actually useful I think to include him in rankings. The 5 or 6 presidents frequently ranked below Harrison are so bad that they are worse than if we didn't have a president.

Highly doubtful

I'll take that bet. Let me know how much money you'd seriously like to lose. Not kidding. Comment on one of my quizzes and we can work out a way to put the money in escrow or something. Is $5000 serious? $1k?

please...he certainly won't be on the top of anyone's list, but until he's been impeached once he won't even approach Trump's stupidity.

...and fwiw for those of you looking for a serious scientific poll of experts or historians where Trump is not ranked in the bottom 10 (or where Biden or Obama are), I'm pretty sure there aren't any. Even including polls that only sought input from conservative or Republican experts. Might be time to reexamine your own biases or information sources. Just humbly putting that forward.

(Polls of Fox News viewers - or MSNBC website visitors, for that matter - are not scientific. Polls of pundits, lobbyists, political commentators or sitting politicians are not taken seriously.)

At the library.

Nixon opened up China and signed some of the most monumental environmental laws in the history, including the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, and the act that created the EPA, among others. He established OSHA, protecting health in the workplace. He worked for the Equal Rights Amendment and supported lowering the voting age to 18.

Nixon was an awful person who would've been impeached and removed from office for his corruption. But his accomplishments rightfully keep him off of this list.

I mean... Civil War, eh?

That's the question I was asking myself, too. Who cares about Trump. Wilson is the worst.

I feel like the further we get from the Trump presidency, the harder it will be to believe just how terrible he actually was. The media could hardly keep up with every scandal, every insane tweet, every corrupt self-serving deal, every lawsuit or credible accusation of crimes or various other misdeeds, every embarrassing gaffe, unconstitutional abuse of power, grift, blunder, etc. There were just too many of them. At least dozens per day. And some, many actually, *so* obviously and tremendously worse than literally anything that any other president in history had ever done... that it just became noise after a while. There were cases of Teapot Dome-level corruption and abuses during the Trump presidency that didn't even get reported on... or just barely... and historians in the future will have a hard time digging them all up underneath everything else. Descriptions of Trump's behavior are going to seem like ridiculous hyperbole for anyone who didn't live through it.

and the more years we spend with more normalish presidents the more the daily outrages are going to start blending together and ultimately fading from memory. Plus there is so much pro-Trumpist cult-like propaganda in the ether, too... 50 years from now historians looking back are going to have a hard time sorting through it all and trying to make sense of what was really going on. And I have a feeling most of them are going to take the view like "geez this guy is really ripping into Trump, surely he couldn't have been *that* bad... maybe there really was some kind of national derangement"... when, in fact, yes, he was that bad. Worse, even. 99% of contemporary coverage of Trump goes far too easy on the man, presumably out of a fear of appearing biased or hyperbolic, or turning off any of his highly sensitive and thoroughly detached from reality supporters.

All of that being said, I somewhat agree. Look up Harding and the Teapot Dome scandal, for instance, or any of the scandals involving Andrew Johnson or Ulysses Grant (who shows up in the bottom 10 on other polls)... they often seem downright quaint by today's standards. It's not that these older presidents were great or anything, but I do think that over time the rhetoric about their failings starts to achieve its own mass and inertia, and it becomes difficult to change anyone's mind.

I somewhat disagree because, even as gross as recent attempts to rehabilitate Nixon's image have been and continue to be, I also feel like in Nixon's case all of the good he did (and there was some) is completely overshadowed by Watergate. That's pretty much all anyone remembers about the guy at this point.

You didn’t miss a pandemic though, for starters

But not the pure incompetence, nepotism, and corruption

You mean Putin, the close ally of your homeboy? That Putin?

Huh? Andrew Johnson is on here. Dead last on this list (even though it should be Trump but whatever).