Like those people who post their IQ ratings of 70 and say they are smarter than 94% of people?
I always thought Harding’s Teapot Scandal made him a near lock at 1/2/3 worst. I’m guessing Buchanan has to be because he basically aimed us at the Civil War.
I’d guess that for those of us who lived through it, while he was in office, things were pretty great. Mind you, many (many many many) of the decisions and actions he did directly led to horrible things in our times, but back then, it seemed pretty good. He also, very much like Obama, was an great speaker. Yes, former actor and great script writers which helped, but I think Trump shows that a strong personality ends up with followers/swaying opinion regardless of actual fact.
These things are always very difficult to judge. You always get a few clear winners at the top, a few obvious losers at the bottom, and a lot of people around about the middle with mixed or uncertain records.
I also think that it tends to skew more recent presidents both up and down, because people are biased as to their immediate effects. A lot of someone’s impact gradually works out over time, and it’s difficult to measure their impact or “legacy” soon after their term , and absolutely impossible while they’re still in office.
It would be an interesting exercise to do this ranking in detail . Come up with a set of criteria, and go at it with attaching numbers and see where they rank. Or do it the other way, and do pairwise comparisons of all possible match-ups to get a well-ordered list.
Finally, if I was to do such a ranking, I’d take WH Harrison as a “neutral” baseline. You know someone is doing badly if they meet the standard of “Dying after 40 days would have been an improvement”.
IDK. Johnson’s preeeeetttty odious. Buchanan failed to stop the war but Johnson hamstrung reconstruction based on who almost literally kissed his boots. Would’ve been the first president removed from office for but ONE vote.
Sure, except for the disastrous foreign policy that included support for dictators and murder squads, the homophobic policies that lead to unnecessary AIDS deaths, general support for the culture wars of the religious right, the undermining of unions and the voodoo economics that ushered in the decline of the middle class… yeah, I don’t recollect things seeming “pretty good” at the time.
ok BUT as someone who teaches sciences and has to break down graphs for students and later test them on it
most - MOST - people will look at this graph and see T in the “top” spot and their thinking will stop there. So no, do not give this graph in its current state to the general population. Make it a simple best to worst line with little arrows on the bottom, Worst needs to be all caps and bold, and best needs to be on the left and worst needs to be on the right. t needs to be at the end. Then we can give this to the masses.
Trump did worse than William Henry Harrison, whose only notable action as president was dying a month after he was inaugurated. He should be reminded of this every day, that he would have been a better president if he had dropped dead in February 2016 2017.
I still have serious problems with this ranking system. In what fantasy world could Trump possibly have earned 10.92 points? His list of accomplishments includes:
And that’s it. Did he get points for golfing? Walking down a ramp? Defrauding? Colluding? Caging children? Stealing? Espionage? Insurrection? Or did they just set a baseline of 10 points so people wouldn’t think their study was biased?
It’s harder to establish parameters for what makes a “good” president than a bad one, especially given the hugely different times and trials they have faced over the past 200+ years.
That being said, it’s not hard to establish some parameters for being a “bad” president, such as corruption, flouting of the law, divisive domestic politics, and bad international diplomacy. Trump scores highly on those measures.
