Fox News reported on some new presidential rankings, which purportedly show Barack Obama as the #6 president in U.S. history and Donald Trump dead last, and MAGA was not happy.
Fox News on Sunday posted an article about the new rankings by the Presidential Greatness Project, which Fox describes as “a group of self-styled experts.” It states that Abraham “Lincoln topped the list of presidents in the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project expert survey for the third time, following his top spot in the rankings in the 2015 and 2018 versions of the survey.”
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“Rounding out the top five in the rankings were Franklin Delano Roosevelt at number two, George Washington at three, Theodore Roosevelt at four, and Thomas Jefferson at five,” according to the report. “Trump was ranked in last place in the survey, being ranked worse than James Buchanan at 44, Andrew Johnson at 43, Franklin Pierce at 42, and William Henry Harrison at 41.”
The report states that Obama and Joe Biden “ranked an average of 6th and 13th, respectively, among Democrat respondents, and 15th and 30th by Republicans.”
Worst is a pretty high bar to clear though. Like, Jackson literally committed the Trail of Tears, genociding all the Indians against the express orders of the SCOTUS, who he told to pound sand because he controlled the army and there wasn’t jack or shit they could do to stop him.
Like, Trump was real real bad for sure, but like, Trail of Tears, literal death marches at gunpoint bad? Idk.
Wait until his second term and you will probably agree with the lowest possible rank for Trump.
Or you can make the sort of detached cynical and dehumanizing raw numbers argument that without Trump doing basically everything he could to fuck up handling covid and spread insane misinformation, he is largely the most responsible of all people in America for covid deaths beyond basically the first wave, roughly 9 times more people than were killed/displaced/genocided than Jackson’s trail of tears.
I dont even want to attempt to get into some kind of moral argument about which of those things is worse, so there ya go, numbers based.
Just to add I think you could make some of the same arguments for the degrading of healthcare/social safety nets and the EPA. If we’re purely talking numbers and not specific cruelty.
One of the many fucked up things Trump did–there are so many that it’s easy to forget–was meeting with Navajo tribe veterans under a Jackson portrait. He loves Jackson and would repeat all Jackson did if he could.
I mean, trump would have loved to create his own trail of tears (not that he knows what that was, historically). I guess it’s reasonable to deny credit for what he wanted to do versus what someone actually did, though.