Ranking the Presidents

Trump wants us to think of him as the greatest president in American history. This is why that won't happen.

On this Presidents Day I'd like to say a few words about "presidential greatness." Historians and political scientists (and all Americans) are regularly asked to rank the presidents. The first poll was conducted in 1948 by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger and published in Life Magazine.

Schlesinger supported the way that presidents like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had remade the presidency. Like others who later advocated for a “unitary executive,” Schlesinger was an advocate for a stronger Executive Branch: “The great Presidents were strong Presidents. Each of them magnified the executive branch at the expense of the other branches of the government,” he wrote in 1948.

His son, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., explained in The Politics of Hope in 1962: “The heroic leader has the Promethean responsibility to affirm human freedom against the supposed inevitabilities of history. A purposeful and vital democracy must rest on a belief in the potency of choice-on the conviction that individual decisions do affect the course of events.”

Prometheus stole fire from the Gods--we're not talking about a little bit of responsibility here, we're talking about A LOT of responsibility. Who would be up to that task? What human could do it?

The presidency was to be powerful, which made sense in a world defined by the president's ability to destroy humanity by launching nuclear war. And the president was to be the nation’s hero. Thinking of the president as a powerful hero changed the separation and balance of powers, amounting to a “second Constitution” in which the president, not Congress, was the center of power in the nation.

According to Sean Wilentz the “great presidents” were "presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office."

We create heroes out of presidents, which increases their already massive powers. All presidential candidates run as would-be heroes who will save the nation from crisis. They use their campaigns to narrate a world in crisis and argue that they are the right hero for the moment.

Some presidents certainly have led our nation heroically. Presidents who guided the nation successfully during "stormy times" are remembered by history as heroes. There are three presidents who routinely sit at the top of the presidential rankings: Lincoln, Washington, and FDR. They guided the nation through its greatest crises--Civil War, Founding, and the Great Depression.

But not all presidents end up being heroes. Presidents are just regular humans, after all and some of them, it turns out, aren’t very good leaders. Wilentz calls those unheroic presidents “calamitous” who when “faced with enormous difficulties…divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust.”

According to the latest poll of presidential greatness, Donald Trump is currently ranked as calamitous—the very worst president in American history. Trump is twice impeached, he led a catastrophic pandemic response, he led an insurrection to prevent the peaceful transferal of power, he wrecked foreign alliances and American soft power, he gutted government functions, he ran up a huge debt through unfunded tax breaks, and that was only his first term. Now he is embarked upon a chaotic dismantling of the federal government and a chaotic destabilizing of the post-WWII world order. Quite calamitous.

Trump is ranked absolutely LAST out of all our presidents, worst than the guy who started the Civil War, the guy who started the Great Depression, AND the guy who died after one month in office. And he deserves it too—his first presidency was a calamitous failure, his second one will be worse.

But he hates that we think that.

In a 2018 interview Chris Wallace asked Trump where he ranked himself “in the pantheon of great presidents”? Trump said he would “give himself an A+” then he asked, “is that enough? Can I go higher than that?”

Trump wants to be thought of as the best president, a winner. It’s all that matters to him and, as I explained here, his desire for “presidential greatness” makes him a world-historical threat to the nation and to the world.

And while Trump will certainly make America much worse than it was before he took office, we can at least laugh at his pathetic smallness while he strives for greatness.

If you’re looking to laugh at Trump, then notice how Trump talks about the “great presidents,” especially Lincoln.

“This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington,” Trump said when launching his embarrassing digital trading cards in 2022. In a more recent interview on Fox Trump said, “Lincoln was probably a great president, although I’ve always said why wasn’t that settled? You know, I’m a guy that — it doesn’t make sense. We had a Civil War.” Probably great, but maybe not so great.

Why does Trump always compare himself to Lincoln? It’s a strategy called anchoring: Lincoln is one of America's top three greatest presidents, Trump wants you to think that he's like him--a "great" president too. But, why does he always waffle about how "great" Lincoln was? Trump wants to replace Lincoln.

Trump wants to replace Lincoln as our nation’s greatest president so badly, but he never will. Lincoln was martyred for defending the Union. Trump was impeached for trying to destroy the Union.

Trump’s need for “presidential greatness” takes him to some fairly comical places. For example, this May 2020 interview where Trump put himself on a heroic stage in an attempt to anchor to Lincoln's prestige. But Lincoln’s marble gaze looks past Trump with indifference. Trump sits beneath him looking small, unheroic, and very pathetic—Lincoln is great; Trump is calamitous.