Is there any doubt that Trump is the worst President in American history?

The nation hasn’t been this bad off since the Civil War. And he did it all in less than 4 years. He lost his party the House, the Senate, and the White House, and tarnished their reputation for a generation or more. He got impeached. And will probably get impeached again. He lost the support of a large swath of his own party, has had a revolving door cabinet (I think that’s called a lazy susan actually) and he’s not even on speaking terms with his own Vice President after throwing him under the bus and trying to get him murdered. He incited a fucking insurrection at the Capitol with his own supporters. He’s the closest this country has ever come to falling prey to fascism.

And that’s to say nothing for his absolutely fucking awful handling of the worst pandemic in over a century.

He’s the worst ever, and I don’t think it’s even close.

It’s like the Olympics. Every four years the athletes get a little bit better. Human progress in action.

I would agree with both of these. The media has changed what we know and has also shaped our opinion of Trump. We know more of Trump via his own idiotic use of social media. And while he is a terrible person, and his incitement to riot makes him a major contender, there are some very corrupt individuals in our nations past. Most often it is the people who come in with the president who are the worst.

The division within the country isn’t so much his doing as something he inherited and took advantage of. But yea, his track record for four years is amazing.

Yes, Trump is definitely the worst.

Enough of these vague “Well, some other presidents in the past were pretty bad, too” equivocations. If someone thinks there was a president worse at the job, let them put forth their candidate and make their case. Otherwise, bow down to the new God-Emperor of terribleness. There can be only one!

He was before this, but people pretended otherwise to coddle his supporters. Now there isn’t any doubt.

It’s hard to know which scale to measure by! My vote is for Andrew Jackson. More evil, but also more competent.

Yeah, it’s easy to paint Trump as the worst, he’s definitely in the conversation, but there are a few other inglorious candidates.

It also partly matters what metric you are using. Jackson and Taylor came to mind for me. Pierce and Buchanan are good calls (and while Taylor set the stage, both had the chance to defuse it. So Taylor probably should be ranked as bad, but put slightly above both simply due to his abbreviated time in office).

Ultimately long term consequences matter. If the right wing extremism of our day is tamped down, and the radical right back broken, then Trump probably escapes the basement.

But if another takes up the mantle, and he continues to spout his rhetoric, and we see more political violence? He can certainly earn it.

Destroying the republic for fascist policy certainly would take the cake. But we won’t know for at least a decade if that’s true. And we have to hope we don’t get a more expedient confirmation.

Trump ran the country in a singularly incompetent manner, and then tried to destroy the country itself when he lost reelection.

It is definitely a 4 man race (sorry Taylor, I’m dropping you to an honorable mention because Trig is right and Pierce and Buchanan own it more). There are legitimate cases that could be made for Jackson, Pierce, Buchanan, and Trump. I don’t really think anyone else has a chance.

And all three of the historical members of the club took a decade or two to fully assess their terribleness

I think the only one that compares to Trump is Jackson, but I also think Trump handily wins it.

And that’s without time to even assess Trump. Time will make it worse as we find out what the fuck was actually going on and his cultists foment political violence for decades.

I almost, almost get nostalgic for the George W Bush years when comparing to Trump, and I was 10000000% convinced at the time that W was as bad as it gets. Oops.

So yeah, worst in my lifetime by a long shot.

It blows my mind no one has mentioned (Andrew) Johnson yet. The failure of reconstruction and the subsequent Jim Crow era can be placed squarely at his feet. Tyler was also horrid.

Anyway, Trump is most certainly in that bottom grouping, but it’s too soon to say how low. He wasn’t a genocidal maniac like Jackson (but probably only because he had constraints that Jackson didn’t) and didn’t come as close to destroying the country like Buchanan (but give it time). However, he did have a counter-productive response to a major pandemic, stood by while police continued their quasi-genocidal pogrom against blacks (which is true of most all presidents, but Trump was actively hostile to a widely publicized movement against it), and was a greater threat to the nation than perhaps any other in that I do not think it unfair to characterize him as an actual enemy of the nation itself.

So while Johnson is still my worst, ask again in a decade or two.

Of course, this is a very US-centric approach. Internationally, you might be able to argue for a few others being worse than Trump (though, again, ask again in a decade).

I mean… He literally tried to, on purpose.

Well, people always think the time they live in is the worst or is on the track to becoming the worst. Other than sci-fi which actually has some optimistic mixed with the pessimistic you don’t see much “these are great times and they will only get better” quotes from people.

Yeah, but we’ve not reached an actual Civil War yet. We might get there due to his actions/inactions, but I can’t give or take points for hypotheticals or counterfactuals. Many of the things Trump did are unparalleled and uniquely odious, but we don’t know the full effect yet. To his credit, he didn’t preside over a chattel-slave state and performed fewer coups than several past presidents, but that’s about all the positives I can think of. So, I’m cool with considering him the worst modern president right now.

I don’t think I’ve ever loathed a person the way I loathe Trump, but looking at the bigger picture, it takes time to properly assess the amount and extent of the damage done. With long-dead people, it’s clearer.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Did you read my previous posts?

What an odd response. I don’t quite know that you are getting at, sorry.

Yeah remember when we thought school shootings and lunatics mowing down people in church would be the worst things we have to deal with, then a global pandemic and an incompetent president and the rise of white supremacy to the point where even apologist can’t deny it anymore occurred, not to mention the continued loss of life of black lives, India and China seem on the edge of a constant conflict over land in mountains, Hong Kong is finally succumbing to the CCP, all our game companies worship the CCP to get a few more bucks, as do our movie studios for that matter… and climate change is so messed up hurricanes don’t seem that interested in Florida anymore and half the West Coast is under constant threat from wildfires while the people in charge keep shouting about rakes.

I think Trump will be marked as the worst president in American History today because his damage is lasting, cannot be uneasily done, and he is more than willing to keep taking others down even without the office.

Eh, I’m not convinced that tagging pre-Civil War presidents with a heap of blame for what happened with secession and the war and all is really justified. Certainly none of them did much to help, but the situation IMO was pretty much baked-in by the compromises made starting with the drafting of the Constitution and continuing through up until 1860. The Constitution really wasn’t capable of dealing with the divide over slavery, and that really was what mattered. The country as a whole was not then, or for a long time thereafter, going to accept a biracial or multiracial idea of citizenship, not to mention social equality or even integration. Even the slave states that were, like Virginia in the late 18th century, willing to consider abolition in theory (before the cotton gin made all those surplus slaves valuable of course) never had to put up or shut up because they couldn’t get over the race issue. Jefferson himself spelled it out in his Notes on the State of Virginia, where he flat-out said slavery was better than what he called miscegenation.

So I’m not sure what a president of any party could have actually done. Northerners were not willing to throw down the gauntlet until South Carolina actually fired on Americans, and even Lincoln had a tough time holding his coalition together throughout the war.