Scholars Now Rank Donald Trump As the Worst President in U.S. History

[W. Niederhut]

I have long believed as much,* and I say this as a guy who asked Santa Claus for a hardback book about American Presidents for Christmas in 1964, at age 7.

During the past 60 years, I have read biographies of most American Presidents.

We have had previous discussions about this subject on the Education Forum with American history scholars, including James DiEugenio.

My own opinion, stated previously, is that the last of the old Jacksonian Democrats, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, have long been somewhat unfairly vilified for their well-intentioned efforts to save the Union and preserve the old Jacksonian coalition between northern Democrats and Southern slave holders.

For their reluctance to dissolve the Union, Buchanan was almost hanged in Pennsylvania during the Civil War, and Pierce ended his days as a lonely pariah in New England.

Compared to Donald Trump, and Andrew Johnson, both Pierce and Buchanan were well-educated men and, in Pierce's case, a decorated U.S. war veteran (Mexican American War.)

Pierce was a Colgate alumnus, and close college chum of the great American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Buchanan was a diligent, well-respected lawyer and distinguished American diplomat.

In similar fashion, Millard Fillmore was vilified by history for his efforts, in 1850, to preserve the Union.

Andrew Johnson, the blatantly racist drunkard from East Tennessee who sabotaged proper Reconstruction, comes closest to rivalling Trump for worst POTUS in history, IMO.

George W. Bush also deserves a disastrous ranking for his promotion of the specious, multi-trillion dollar PNAC Neocon "War on Terror."

But only Donald Trump has done what historian Michael Beschloss called, "the worst thing a President can do"-- refusing to relinquish power.

* Official Results of the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey

(Link won't copy-- see LA Times article below for link)

Experts rank Biden among the best presidents. Trump? Not so much - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

 

 

Edited February 20 by W. Niederhut

[Robert Morrow]

LBJ was the worst.

[W. Niederhut]

On 3/24/2024 at 1:11 AM, Robert Morrow said:

LBJ was the worst.

Robert,

     I agree with your comparison of Trump and LBJ, in the sense that both men were self-aggrandizing psychopaths.

     But LBJ, at least, facilitated the passage of some valuable, pro publica domestic legislation-- the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Medicare.

    Trump's lone legislative "achievement" was the passage of the Heritage Foundation's December 2017 Billionaire Tax Cut & Healthcare Demolition Act.

[Robert Morrow]

5 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Robert,

     I agree with your comparison of Trump and LBJ, in the sense that both men were self-aggrandizing psychopaths.

     But LBJ, at least, facilitated the passage of some valuable, pro publica domestic legislation-- the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Medicare.

    Trump's lone legislative "achievement" was the passage of the Heritage Foundation's December 2017 Billionaire Tax Cut & Healthcare Demolition Act.

I liked that Trump tax cut and wish Congress had made it permanent. I am not a liberal. However, I do not want a fascist dictatorship.

I classify the psychological profile of Lyndon Johnson and Donald Trump as "malignantly narcissistic criminal psychopath and pathological liar."

You are a mental health professional so you know what those terms mean.

For others, I use the term "malignantly narcissistic" to differentiate from those who are merely narcissistic, lots of people like that. A psychopath is someone who does not care about others. A true amoral psychopath will steal $100,000 or more from an old lady and just not give a hoot, or sexually abuse a child and just not care, or torture a dog or cat and just not care. A psychopath only cares about not getting caught.

LBJ cared about poor oppressed black people just as much as Trump cares about unborn babies: which is to say none at all. Each man was servicing a political base in service of his own protection and power.

LBJ and Trump were both "pathological liars" which means someone who compulsively lies all the time about seemingly everything.

[Michael Griffith]

On 2/19/2024 at 7:39 PM, W. Niederhut said:

I have long believed as much,* and I say this as a guy who asked Santa Claus for a hardback book about American Presidents for Christmas in 1964, at age 7.

During the past 60 years, I have read biographies of most American Presidents.

We have had previous discussions about this subject on the Education Forum with American history scholars, including James DiEugenio.

My own opinion, stated previously, is that the last of the old Jacksonian Democrats, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, have long been somewhat unfairly vilified for their well-intentioned efforts to save the Union and preserve the old Jacksonian coalition between northern Democrats and Southern slave holders.

For their reluctance to dissolve the Union, Buchanan was almost hanged in Pennsylvania during the Civil War, and Pierce ended his days as a lonely pariah in New England.

Compared to Donald Trump, and Andrew Johnson, both Pierce and Buchanan were well-educated men and, in Pierce's case, a decorated U.S. war veteran (Mexican American War.)

Pierce was a Colgate alumnus, and close college chum of the great American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Buchanan was a diligent, well-respected lawyer and distinguished American diplomat.

In similar fashion, Millard Fillmore was vilified by history for his efforts, in 1850, to preserve the Union.

Andrew Johnson, the blatantly racist drunkard from East Tennessee who sabotaged proper Reconstruction, comes closest to rivalling Trump for worst POTUS in history, IMO.

George W. Bush also deserves a disastrous ranking for his promotion of the specious, multi-trillion dollar PNAC Neocon "War on Terror."

But only Donald Trump has done what historian Michael Beschloss called, "the worst thing a President can do"-- refusing to relinquish power.

I wonder how readers will react to your post when they learn that you are a 9/11 Truther and an L. Fletcher Prouty apologist. The 9/11 inside-job conspiracy theory peddled by Truthers is perhaps the most inexcusable, absurd conspiracy theory ever advanced on the planet. 99% of the scientists who've examined it have declared it to be baseless, ridiculous, unscientific, and bizarre. It ranks right up there with the fake Moon landings conspiracy theory--a theory which, by the way, was supported by a journal that you've cited as a source.

Readers can find your awful, embarrassing attempts to defend Fletcher Prouty in this forum (LINK). For example, they can see your curious, discrediting refusal to admit that Prouty lied when he made the bizarre claim that he flew Chiang Kai-shek and his delegation to the Tehran Conference and that Chiang secretly attended the conference. Prouty's only source for this myth was a lone sentence in a 1994 book by William Gibbons that was clearly an innocent misstatement that confused the Cairo Conference and the Tehran Conference. 

They can see your curious, discrediting refusal to admit that Prouty plainly and clearly indicated that he was sent to the South Pole to keep him from possibly preventing the JFK assassination.

They can see your curious, discrediting attempts to justify Prouty's bizarre suggestions that Churchill had FDR poisoned and that Princess Diana was murdered by "the Secret Team." 

And, they can see your genuinely shameful excuses and denials regarding Prouty's speaking appearances at two conferences held by anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying groups (Liberty Lobby and the IHR), regarding his 10 appearances on Liberty Lobby's anti-Semitic radio program, regarding his letter to the editor of the IHR's Holocaust-denying journal praising the journal's principles, and regarding his sleazy smearing of Scientology whistleblowers and his shameful defense L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. 

Edited Saturday at 12:17 PM by Michael Griffith

[W. Niederhut]

13 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

I wonder how readers will react to your post when they learn that you are a 9/11 Truther and an L. Fletcher Prouty apologist.

Griffith,

      You are committing libel, again.

     You, frankly, don't have the educational background to understand the scientific data proving that the World Trade Center skyscrapers (WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7) were demolished by explosives on 9/11.   That science data has been aggressively suppressed in the U.S. mainstream media.

     Conversely, the bogus NIST computer "simulation" of the WTC demolitions is a complete fraud-- produced by Bush-Cheney administration insiders who refused to even publish the parameters they used in their fraudulent computer "simulation."  Nor did they acknowledge the obvious visible explosions that demolished the Twin Towers, or even attempt to explain the obvious free fall explosive demolition of WTC7.

     Office fires don't cause steel skyscrapers to abruptly collapse in a symmetrical free fall.

    A forensic arson investigation of the 9/11 WTC demolitions was never conducted by the NYFD, the U.S. government, or any private insurance companies that paid Larry Silverstein $4.5 billion for the WTC damages.  (In fact, Silverstein's insurance contracts-- drafted and signed shortly before 9/11--expressly forbade a private arson investigation by the insurance companies in the event of a "terrorist" attack on the WTC.)

     I was recruited by the faculty to tutor undergrads in physics when I was in college at Brown University, before later graduating from Harvard Medical School.  I studied a lot of chemistry and physics at Brown and won awards and scholarships in those subjects.

     Do you understand Newton's laws of motion?

     Do you know what melting points are?

     Have you studied the visual and auditory evidence of the serial explosions that demolished the Twin Towers?

     What was the resistance to the observed near free fall collapse of WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7 to Ground Zero?

     What temperatures were required to liquefy the steel that was "flowing like a foundry" at Ground Zero?

     As for your false, defamatory, John McAdams/CIA tropes about Fletcher Prouty-- we have repeatedly debunked them on the Education Forum.

     There is already more than enough of this kind of U.S. government disinformation about Prouty and the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth on the internet.  We don't need it here on the Education Forum.

 

Edited Sunday at 01:25 AM by W. Niederhut

[Michael Griffith]

I should add and clarify for the sake of new readers that I am not voting for Donald Trump and am not a huge fan of Trump. One of my main objections to Trump is that I believe he is personally immoral and dishonorable, which is one reason I am supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president. 

I believe Trump did many good things as president, such as the tax cuts, the USMCA trade deal, imposing tariffs on Chinese and Russian goods, calling out NATO nations for failing to meet their treaty obligations on defense spending, appointing good judges to the federal judiciary, moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, strongly supporting Israel, etc.

But, I also believe that Trump did many bad things, such as gutting our environmental laws, refusing to deal with the serious problem of maritime plastic waste, appointing several corporate cronies to key positions in his administration, refusing to stand up to Congress on reckless federal spending, adding $8.4 trillion to the national debt, trying to pressure Ukraine's president into investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and frequently provoking needless controversies by making intemperate, insulting, juvenile remarks and/or by making false statements. 

Edited Sunday at 12:27 PM by Michael Griffith

[W. Niederhut]

3 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

I should add and clarify for the sake of new readers that I am not voting for Donald Trump and am not a huge fan of Trump. One of my main objections to Trump is that I believe he is personally immoral and dishonorable, which is one reason I am supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president. 

I believe Trump did many good things as president, such as the tax cuts, the USMCA trade deal, imposing tariffs on Chinese and Russian goods, calling out NATO nations for failing to meet their treaty obligations on defense spending, appointing good judges to the federal judiciary, moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, strongly supporting Israel, etc.

But, I also believe that Trump did many bad things, such as gutting our environmental laws, refusing to deal with the serious problem of maritime plastic waste, appointing several corporate cronies to key positions in his administration, refusing to stand up to Congress on reckless federal spending, adding $8.4 trillion to the national debt, trying to pressure Ukraine's president into investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and frequently provoking needless controversies by making intemperate, insulting, juvenile remarks and/or by making false statements. 

Amen to that, Michael.

But let's acknowledge that Trump's 2017 tax cuts for billionaires and corporations played a major role in his $8 trillion dollar increase in the national debt!

And, like the 2001 and 2003 Bush/Cheney tax cuts, the 2017 Trump tax cut did not have a significant impact on U.S. GDP or private sector job growth.

Most of that money went into corporate stock buy backs, or overseas.

While largely creating our gargantuan national debt, Reaganomics has been a scam, and a recurrent failure as a domestic economic stimulus.

One reason for this, as some economists pointed out in December of 2017, is that the Trump and Bush "supply-side" tax cuts didn't include incentives for domestic investment.

Much of the rebated money simply flowed abroad, to lower cost labor markets.

Edited Sunday at 03:51 PM by W. Niederhut

[Michael Griffith]

W. Niederhut, why don't you tell our readers whether or not you believe one of the main 9/11 Truther theories, namely, that a missile, not an airliner, hit the Pentagon on 9/11, and that American Airlines Flight 77--the airliner that hit the Pentagon--did not actually hit the Pentagon but was diverted to a secret site and that its passengers were either killed, imprisoned, or placed in witness protection programs?

No, folks, I'm not kidding. Watch the nutjob documentary Loose Change, which also pushes the bizarre "controlled demolitions" theory for the collapse of the WTC towers (including WTC 7). These loons brush aside the fact that hundreds of witnesses saw Flight 77 flying low and heading straight toward the Pentagon, that dozens of Pentagon employees helped clean up the debris from Flight 77 (a friend of mine was one of them), and that some of the Flight 77 passengers made cell phone calls to friends/loved ones just before the airliner hit the Pentagon to report that their plane had been hijacked.

So, W. Niederhut, do you believe the theory that a missile, not an airliner, hit the Pentagon on 9/11? 

While you're at it, why don't you answer questions that I've posed many times to 9/11 Truthers: Why, why, oh why would the alleged inside-job plotters have planted explosives in the WTC buildings in the first place? Did they think that the American people would not be thoroughly outraged by the deaths of hundreds of Americans on the two airliners and in the towers when the planes hit the towers, and by the infliction of massive damage on two iconic symbols of American enterprise?

And, also, who smuggled in hundreds of pounds of explosives into the WTC buildings? When? How? Ever since the first Islamic terrorist attempt to bomb the Twin Towers in the 1990s, security had been tight at the buildings, with every single person and their suitcases being scanned. How did the alleged plotters manage to get hundreds of pounds of explosives into those buildings? 

Edited Monday at 08:58 PM by Michael Griffith

[W. Niederhut]

Michael,

  I'd be happy to discuss the 9/11 science data, but this is a thread about scholarly rankings of Donald Trump as the worst POTUS in American history-- an assessment which is accurate, in my opinion.

   Briefly...

   What I know, for certain, is that;

1) WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7 were demolished by pre-planted explosives on 9/11.

    All three buildings collapsed abruptly at near free fall acceleration to Ground Zero, indicating abrupt demolition of the entire massive steel sub-structures-- as opposed step-wise, assymetrical collapse by gravitational "pile driver" forces.

2) The high-tech, military grade explosives burned hot enough to completely liquefy steel girders, and they also explosively pulverized thousands of tons of concrete into high-heat, pyroclastic flows into the Manhattan atmosphere.  Jet fuel -- the official government explanation for the WTC demolitions --simply doesn't burn hot enough to liquefy steel.  Nor was there sufficient jet fuel on the upper stories to abruptly demolish the entire massive steel sub-structures below.

So, who put the military-grade, thermitic explosives in WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7 prior 9/11?

Who controlled access to those buildings?

Cui bono? Who, ultimately, benefited from the shocking Pearl Harbor-like 9/11 op?

Also, you must surely know, as a U.S. military intelligence guy, that the U.S. government had successfully flown and maneuvered Boeing jetliners with Raytheon's GPS-guided remote-piloting technology in the summer of 2001.  I think it was tested in Marana, Arizona in August of 2001.

Give that military industrial complex data some thought.