Who Gets To Be Worst?

A friend recently asked me if I thought that trump is the worst president ever.

Here is what I said.

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I have always heard Buchanan is the answer to that question and here is the reply I got when I asked Copilot if that was correct.

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Historians don’t hand out a single, unanimous “worst president” trophy, but James Buchanan is the one who most consistently ends up at the bottom of scholarly rankings. And not by a little—he’s usually dead last.

Here’s why the consensus is so durable:

📉 Why Buchanan is ranked so poorly

• He allowed the country to slide into civil war. Instead of confronting secession, he insisted that states had no right to leave but the federal government had no right to stop them. That paralysis was catastrophic.

• He misread the political moment. The nation was fracturing over slavery, and Buchanan treated it as a legalistic nuisance rather than an existential crisis.

• He actively worsened tensions. His support for the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution in Kansas inflamed national divisions and split his own party.

• He left Lincoln a country already in flames. Seven states had seceded before Lincoln even took the oath. Buchanan’s passivity created a vacuum that extremists filled.

🧭 The deeper architectural failure

Buchanan wasn’t corrupt, nor incompetent in the narrow bureaucratic sense. His failure was structural: he believed the presidency should be a kind of constitutional notary, not an active steward of the republic. In a moment that demanded moral clarity and decisive action, he offered neither.

That’s why historians tend to treat him not as a villain but as a tragic mismatch between temperament and moment—an almost perfect case study in how not to lead a country on the brink.

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But let's move on to what I think.

I am compelled to start with the obvious. We have never had a convicted felon as president. That may or may not affect the quality of a presidency. I think it has already deeply affected it in this case.

And also, we have never had a president with an image like this in his scrapbook:

The fact that Congress hasn't had any questions about that family photo documents a possible beginning of an answer to your question, but Congress' lack of concern documents several deeper and more troubling problems. I'm dodging saying anything about those.

So, moving on:

We have had corrupt presidents, Harding for example with Tea Pot Dome. The big "however" after that statement is "Harding presided over the most openly corrupt administration in U.S. history, but he himself was not the most personally corrupt president. His White House was simply the most exposed—because the scandals were spectacular, well‑documented, and prosecuted. "

So Harding had the disadvantage of having a Congress that had read the Constitution.

donnie, on the other hand, has the advantage of not having a Congress to badger and bother him.

And he has benefited merrily from that fact. Only an idiot would not see that trump is finally in the position to do what he has wanted to do for decades and why he wanted to be president in the first place: the US presidency is the most potentially lucrative franchise on earth. The options available to a president are myriad, ranging from minor beak wetting, through major extortion and beyond to total market manipulation and rigging. We see all of that and all gradations of abject corruption in between daily and we all say "my, my" and move on to the next episode of Crazy Mormon Housewives. Or, whatever.

And then there is that old "is he nuts? thing". In my lifetime - that's the only history I have at my finger-tips to try to answer your question - we have never had a documented sociopath/narcissist/demented president until now. I am not aware of historic accounts of anything similar, but I haven't read every tome extant. So I don't know how history factors those facts into its evaluation of the quality of a president.

And don't forget, the illegality of everything trump has done so far would, by some frames of reference, put him in the bad president hopper; but law in these troubled times needs to be flexible to allow great leaders the leeway they need to lead us, I guess.

Nixon was assured by his Congressional colleagues that he would be impeached and removed from office for covering up the fact that he had participated in a plot to rig a presidential election and then covered it up. So, he resigned and is generally considered one our less good presidents.

Franklin Roosevelt may, or may not have, allowed America to gradually get sucked into World War Two; but it was a strategic war, and FDR got a Declaration of War from Congress to get into it; and we won it; and America pretty much called the shots in the World until 2017. FDR is generally thought to be either number two or number three on the list of great presidents.

donnie is spending three billion dollars a day on a stupid war that may bring down the world economy; he declared it personally one late evening on truth social; he didn't want to trouble Congress, which as I said elsewhere is on permanent break. I guess judgements on that decision, its impeachibility, and the other things I have mentioned about him in this note - there are so many more - that effect his place in the rankings of US presidents, are all left to history.

However, that history hasn't been written yet, so there isn't an authority, or authority wanna be, yet on record, to refer to, to answer your question. 

So I'll volunteer.

My answer is it's difficult for all but the most stupid, or the most associatively corrupt to not know the answer.

donnie wins.