Historians just ranked the presidents. Trump wasn't last.
Despite being impeached twice, former president Donald Trump is not the worst president in U.S. history, according to 142 presidential historians surveyed by C-SPAN, the results of which were released Wednesday. But the survey doesn’t give Trump much to brag about either. He ranked lower than William Henry Harrison, who was only president for 31 days, and John Tyler, the only former president buried in a coffin draped with the Confederate flag. So who ranked worse than Trump? According to the historians, presidents Franklin “Bleeding Kansas” Pierce, Andrew “First to Be Impeached” Johnson and James “Failed to Stop the Civil War” Buchanan, who came in last.
To be clear, this was an informal survey whose respondents were selected by C-SPAN, not a scientific poll. Dozens more historians were invited to complete the survey this time than in years past. C-SPAN said this was to reflect “new diversity in race, gender, age and philosophy,” but that also makes it harder to compare it to previous surveys.
Still, the respondents are all distinguished presidential historians covering a broad range of perspectives, and there are insights to gain from their collective opinions. Even with all the new historians participating, the top and bottom rankings remained unchanged. Since 2009, the top four presidents have been: 1) Abraham Lincoln 2) George Washington 3) Franklin D. Roosevelt and 4) Theodore Roosevelt. (Washington and FDR switched places in the 2000 survey.) The bottom three have been always been Pierce, Johnson and Buchanan, in that order.
C-SPAN is not the only outfit conducting presidential rankings, and other recent surveys have included Trump before he left office. In 2018, when Boise State University surveyed presidential scholars for its Presidents & Executive Politics Presidential Greatness survey, Trump came in last. And that was before the two impeachments, the coronavirus pandemic and the Capitol insurrection.
The historians do not rank the presidents themselves. Instead they are asked to rate each president from 1 to 10 on 10 leadership categories; the averages of all of the ratings are then ranked. The 10 categories are public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, relations with Congress, vision/setting an agenda, pursuit of equal justice for all and performance within the context of the times.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/06/30/presidential-rankings-2021-cspan-historians/
C-SPAN survey results
https://www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2021/?page=overall
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