Trump, Presidents, Politics
Was Trump a “bad president?” That’s up to us to decide.
How unique were Trump and the other lowest-rated presidents?
President Trump left office as perhaps the least popular president in modern history. According to Gallup data, just 41 percent of the public approved of the job he did on average during his tenure and Trump is the only president since Gallup began their survey in 1938 to never achieve a 50 percent approval rating.
Gallup polls are not unique; Pew survey data shows that more than 50 percent of the public disapproved of the way Trump handled his job as president for his entire term. Trump also ranked last in a 2018 survey of presidency scholars within political science.
Worth considering is whether public and scholarly estimation of Trump will remain low, or rise over time as it has for many former presidents.
Experts have lots of thoughts on what makes for a good or even “great” president. These involve both ranking our former (and occasionally current) presidents as well as analyzing those rankings. According to research from Curt Nichols, being president during a time of crisis or war, being re-elected, and serving during robust economic times tend to be associated with higher rankings.
At least one political scientist has taken a different approach. Before he passed away in 2014, Tulane University’s Thomas Langston analyzed the “bad presidents”: those consistently ranked as the worst in American history (at least as of the time he wrote the paper). As Langston noted, “many presidents encounter failure; but only a small number are judged by historians and political scientists to have been failures.”
Langston identified three “paths to failure”: ineptitude, scandal, and unwillingness to compromise. But he also noted that those conditions are not enough to condemn any president to low rankings. Jimmy Carter, a president whom many consider to have been inept at the job, ranked about in the middle in both a 2017 C-SPAN survey of historians and a 2018 Siena College poll. Bill Clinton and Ulysses Grant, who each experienced some kind of scandal during their presidencies, have risen in expert estimation. Woodrow Wilson, who famously refused to compromise over the Treaty of Versailles and proposed League of Nations, often is ranked as a top 10 or top 15 president.
Langston found that, with the exception of Warren G. Harding (whose reputation for “badness” Langston believed was less deserved than others), the presidents who consistently rank at the bottom — James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, John Tyler — are connected by the Civil War either in actively supporting slavery in southern states or not taking action to prevent the war itself. Tyler was sympathetic to upholding slavery in southern states, even being elected to the Confederate States’ legislature after his presidency. Pierce supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act that essentially repealed the Missouri Compromise over permitting slavery in newly-admitted states and led to conflicts known as “Bleeding Kansas.” Buchanan was inept in a way that accelerated the Confederate states’ formation and rebellion against the country. While Andrew Johnson was impeached based on his intemperateness and refusal to comply with the Tenure of Office Act, he also sided with the recently-defeated Confederacy and subverted Reconstruction.
Slavery (or support thereof) is not enough to condemn a president to failure, as slaveholders George Washington and Thomas Jefferson continue to be ranked as great or near-great presidents. Langston found it is specifically the Civil War and an inability or unwillingness to avert that conflict that distinguishes those presidents deemed to be failures.
Langston’s research presents us with two questions to consider as we move further away from the Trump presidency, currently ranked down with the Civil War failures: will we continue to see the Civil War as unique, an event so aberrant in American history that only proximity to its cause is consistently associated with presidential failure; or was Trump so unique (or similar-enough to Harding) that we make an exception and define presidential failure as “either leading the country Civil War or being Donald Trump?”
If the answer to either question or both is “no,” then our answers also should reflect on Trump’s predecessors. If we believe that Trump — associated as his presidency was with “kids in cages”, denying or downplaying a pandemic virus, using white supremacist and Nazi imagery and symbolism, and lying about, well, there’s a whole database of things—then it is also time to give fuller consideration to Ronald Reagan purposefully choosing the site of the Mississippi Burning murders to express support for “states’ rights”, lying about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair, and ignoring the AIDS epidemic; to his successor, George H.W. Bush, appealing to racism through the “Willie Horton ad”; to Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order that put thousands of American citizens in internment camps simply because of their ethnicity; to how Woodrow Wilson’s and Andrew Jackson’s innovations in presidential power and public administration reflected their racism; to how slavery enabled Washington, Jefferson, and our other early presidents (minus the Adamses) to be who they were.
How we view the presidency and its officeholders is up to us.
