| Jumpin said: Trump is not just the worst current leader in Western civilization, but probably the worst US President in history. His regime has fostered stupidity across the US in the form of MAGA, his trade taxation is working to crush the US economy. Through a combination of greed and incompetence, he has spread greater strife and uncertainty across Western civilization than any Western leader has done since early-mid 20th century. He's hated, because he's not just terrible, but has only injected textbook stupidity into the US policy (See Cipolla's five laws of stupidity, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison to see parallels to the nature of stupidity they criticize) |
It's not a bad case you offer, but to be strictly technical about it, as one of those nerds who likes to do things like rank the presidents of my country for fun (it's an outgrowth of my list fetish 
), I feel that people tend to somewhat exaggerate the importance of their own times. Trump is definitely one of the worst presidents we've ever had as far as I'm concerned, but anyone who thinks he's THE worst probably isn't familiar with the likes of James Buchanan, for example, whose actions were so aggressively pro-slavery that it literally broke the country in two, leading directly to a four-year civil war. We have had some really, really bad presidents before. I personally have him ranked in as our fourth-worst. We're living in a kind of second Gilded Age, I believe, and I think of Trump as a Gilded Age mindset type of leader who I rank accordingly.
I have sort of a working list of the IMO ten best presidents we've ever had to contrast with what the worst ones represent:
1. Abraham Lincoln
2. Franklin Roosevelt
3. George Washington
4. Thomas Jefferson
5. Teddy Roosevelt
6. Woodrow Wilson
7. Lyndon Johnson <-- Sorry, I have to include a Texan somewhere.
8. Dwight Eisenhower
9. Barack Obama
10. Harry Truman
The best of the best guided the nation successfully through the most severe crises and challenges in its history. The worst ones actively created some of the worst crises in our history and only historians even remember them a century later. Just my take.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 13 April 2025
