No, Trump isn’t the worst president ever
Donald Trump’s tumultuous two-month tenure as Commander in Chief has received mixed reviews, but it is both premature and factually incorrect to call him the worst president in US history.
For at least the last forty years, political detractors have heatedly denounced every contemporary president as the worst ever to occupy the Oval Office.
And they have been wrong every time.
Making “worst ever” assertions evidently evokes some level of juvenile glee, and it may rally political allies. Trump himself won election partly by deriding Barack Obama as “the worst president, maybe in the history of our country.”
But those short-term payoffs come at an unacceptable cost.
False “worst ever” claims stem from deep political and historical ignorance. They assume that the past has nothing useful to teach us, that neither context nor evidence really matter. Most of all, they perpetuate the bogus and arrogant notion that any sweeping historical claim is credible as long as it affirms our present biases.
Serious study of the past can inhibit these childish intellectual reflexes. Historical literacy tempers our judgments, contextualizes our current concerns, and instills a sense of humility about the human condition.
