Was Trump the Worst President? Not on This List
A new ranking ignores the crucial presidential skill of strengthening party coalitions for the future.
History will judge.
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There’s a new edition of C-SPAN’s historical presidential rankings, with the headline, I suppose, that the experts involved — academic and popular historians, with a couple of political scientists and some others thrown in — rank Donald Trump 41st of the 44 presidents. (Joe Biden is not included; Grover Cleveland, the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms, counts once in this exercise.) That’s higher than I would rank him, although the bottom three in this survey, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan, are all legitimate contenders for the title of worst president in American history.