Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/19/experts-rank-donald-trump-as-worst-president-ever-in-new-survey-guess-who-came-in-first.html
…
13 Likes
25 Likes
Does his entry come with a little (*) beside it to indicate his ranking was in question due to the use of performance enhancing drugs?
And conversely, I’d rate him as espionage’s crowning pinnacle achievement - Putin placed his very own agent into the US Presidency. No future spymaster could ever hope to top this grand champion.
13 Likes
The competition for last place was not close.
Trump was way worse than Buchanan, who was way worse than A Johnson.
The competion for first was intense.
22 Likes
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Objectively, spoken gaffes aside, he’s kinda kicking butt, especially considering (a) the state of the nation when he took office, and (b) the massive obstructionism from the GOP. That he’s gotten anything done at all is impressive. On top of that, and I know I’m sounding like a broken record (I don’t care), Biden’s Administration so far has been the most progressive US Presidential Administration since probably LBJ.
35 Likes
One thing I noticed that does bother me: the rankings don’t distinguish between the two Harrisons. I assume the one who was President for only a month is the lower rated one, but that’s not clear.
11 Likes
Reagan seems curiously high rated if not for ‘Democrats’ unaccountably rating him far less hard than republicans rated Obama (hmmm)
(“So long as every trumpy republican is asked by fine media folk for their rationale for re-running the worst rated president of all time”)
13 Likes
Note also that the top three Republican Presidents were all ranked higher by Democrats than by modern day Republicans. One more data point showing how much the parties’ positions have changed over the last few generations.
20 Likes
Non-experts rank him higher.
4 Likes
Is the greatness scale that they’re using actually making moral good/bad judgments about what the presidents were doing, or just about how effective they were at doing it? Because if they’re doing morally good/bad judgements these guys rated Andrew Jackson as being “better” than Jimmy Carter, and I would take serious issue with that.
20 Likes
It pleases me to no end knowing that FDR has consistently placed high on these lists for decades, while conservatives are still trying to dismantle the New Deal.
18 Likes
B Harrison 40.64
W Henry Harrison 26.01
A major oversight. Only the breakdown by the rater’s ideology assigns initials, so it involves mild rigamarole.
6 Likes
Up to the pollee, I guess.
Some of the other surveys explicitly point out moral authorities and/or failings.
1 Like
This makes me think a lot of people answering the poll were likely basing their answers on “who played the biggest role strengthening the United States’ geopolitical influence” or something like that rather than “who most faithfully upheld their oath of office.”
6 Likes
That the criteria/judges are so skewed that Ronald Reagan managed to place as the 16th greatest president ever*, which is fucked up, yet Trump still is ranked last is really saying something about how much Trump fails according to any criteria. (I’m reminded of the essay that talked about different moral philosophies - and how in every single one of them, Trump was a moral failure.)
*Rather than one of the worst, where he should be.
13 Likes
No, it needs to be said. And repeated. Constantly until Nov. Even in this little pocket of the internet, people need to keep talking about what he’s accomplished. I’m starting to see more positive coverage of the economy, which unfortunately is a massively over-weighted decider for people, but still virtually nothing about his legislative accomplishments. They don’t even really ascribe the economic success of the past 3 years to his legislative record, merely the nebulous assignment of thousands of economic factors to his “administration” as per usual.
14 Likes
Poor Trump. You know you’re having a bad time when the rotten, dessicated corpse of James Buchanan is doing better than you
5 Likes
Has anyone been able to find the survey instrument?
I checked all the links but came up blank.
I found the one for the other survey, the historians one, and it was laughably vague.
So, even when the results might match my opinions, I question the validity of the survey in general if they won’t share it.
12 Likes
Right, and I’d really like to know the story behind
[of the] 525 respondents, only 154 responses were useable and thus included
13 Likes
