Journalists know to be careful with superlatives. If you write that someone or something is the first or the last, the largest or the smallest, the best or worst, an inconvenient fact will come along to contradict you, sometimes emailed by an irate reader. But at least three academic surveys have found that Donald Trump is the worst president the US has ever had. And it’s true, he is: I defy you to name a worse president.
The most recent of these reports was the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey. It’s more relevant than ever as Trump’s opponents, and some of his former friends, question his sanity as well as his probity. Historians and political scientists were asked to rate each president on a scale of 0 to 100. Trump scored 10.92, coming last out of 45, with the lowest score any president has ever had in this survey.
Trump’s supporters will say this is liberal academic bias, but he was ranked at or near the bottom by experts from across the political spectrum. And this was judged on his performance during his first term, 2017-21. It was before Iran, the war without a strategy, with Trump oscillating between “a whole civilisation will die tonight” and “we have a very good relationship with Iran”.
There’s no growing into the office of president. There’s no time for that as the occupant of the White House lurches from crisis to crisis. The Oval Office reveals character; it does not build it. A friend spoke to a member of Trump’s administration and asked him what it was like serving in the White House. “It’s a 24/7 food fight,” the official said; it never stops.
To be fair to Trump, this is the same as any White House. But that’s why a president should be a level head, a calming figure. Trump is both hyperactive and impulsive, decisions made and unmade as quickly as he can post on Truth Social. Politicians often wear a mask, but with Trump, what you see is what you get. That is a kind of virtue, but Trump has no filter. This made him a great reality TV star, and a terrible leader of the world’s most powerful nation.
Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th US president, knew the power of understatement. “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” he said, and America’s enemies trembled. Trump said, “Open the F**kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!!” And then he caved. America’s enemies, especially Russia and China, can see the pattern. Hashtag Taco – Trump always Chickens Out.
A report in The Wall Street Journal said that when two American airmen were lost in Iran, Trump screamed at his aides “for hours” – they had to keep him out of the Situation Room. He is an emotional and instinctive politician. “He didn’t read,” wrote Michael Wolff in Fire and Fury. “He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.” Trump has what the editor of The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, called a “comprehensive ignorance of history”. Briefing papers have to be single-page, ideally with pictures.
In intellect, Trump has been compared to Ronald Reagan, who was an “amiable dunce” in the words of a political opponent, and to that famous mangler of words, George W Bush. But these two Republican presidents had people skills; in Reagan’s case, you would call it charm. And the folksy, regular guy personas were – partly – an act. Bush joked that “[William F Buckley] wrote a book at Yale; I read one”. There is so much evidence that Trump is just as stupid as he looks. He does not charm.
The other Republican president who invites comparison to Trump is Richard Nixon. Nixon was ruthless, as Trump would like to be, but he was quietly, cleverly devious, drawing up his enemies’ list and plotting his revenge in secret. Trump is unable to keep a secret, and his revenge is often crude, noisy, and public. Nixon was a master strategist; Trump is… not. And Nixon was never actually impeached – he resigned first – while Donald Trump has been impeached twice.
The US president who tops all the surveys is, of course, Abraham Lincoln, who abolished slavery and saved the Union. He is the anti-Trump. The Washington Post counted 30,573 false or misleading claims made by Trump during his first term. Lincoln was “Honest Abe”, incorruptible in his public life and in private. As his law partner recounted, Lincoln was naked in bed with a Springfield prostitute when he found he was $2 short of her fee. He got dressed and left, saying, “I cannot afford to cheat you”. Trump tried to get out of paying $130,000 he had promised to the porn star Stormy Daniels after having sex with her at a golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.
Lincoln was even more careful with other people’s money. He returned $199.25 of his $200 campaign budget “having bought only one barrel of cider”, according to the historian Paul Johnson. Trump is effectively charging people to meet him; the mechanism is to buy a “special edition” of his $TRUMP memecoin. Last year’s top bidder, a Chinese-born crypto billionaire, reportedly bought up to $23m of it; in total, the dinner brought in $148m to two Trump-controlled companies.
Trump has turned the presidency into a money-printer. A New Yorker investigation found that he and his family had made $4bn from it by this January. Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders calls it an “unprecedented kleptocracy”.
Trump’s favourite president is Andrew Jackson, another populist who liked confrontation. He has Jackson’s portrait in the Oval Office. Trump has often said his father, Fred, brought him up to be a “killer” in business. Jackson was a real killer. In 1806, he fought a duel with Charles Dickinson, leaving him to bleed to death. There were other duels and knock-down, drag-out brawls in the street, fought with fists and swords, men rolling bloodied in the muck.
Jackson, at least, was a genuine war hero who understood the risks of combat. Trump is “an eight-year-old playing with toy soldiers,” in the words of the Pennsylvania Governor, Josh Shapiro. He bone-spurred his way out of Vietnam, dodging the draft with a medical exemption for allegedly malformed feet. The condition was never mentioned again. But as even Trump’s harshest critics recognise, he did have his moment of courage and grace under fire. After an assassin’s bullet grazed his ear, he raised a defiant fist – and won an election.
Jackson defied the courts; Nixon defied the courts and Congress. Yet they both believed in the rule of law itself. Every other president – however corrupt, venal or incompetent – respected the constitution as defining the rules of the game. No other president told a crowd to “fight like hell” and then watched on television as they stormed Congress. No other president spoke publicly of refusing to accept the results of an election. No one else mused openly about how they could just keep going, becoming president for life.
Donald J Trump always wanted to be exceptional, unique, one of a kind. He got his wish. He is unique. He is one of a kind. He is the worst.