Source: Fulton County Jail / Fulton County Sheriff’s Office
A new poll of historians ranking American presidents has been released, with former President Donald Trump coming in dead last.
According to reports, a list ranking the greatness of United States presidents beginning with George Washington to the present based on survey responses from historians has been released, with former President Donald Trump coming in dead last – the same position he held the last time the survey was conducted in 2018. Worse for the twice-impeached commander-in-chief, he also earned the title of “most polarizing” president.
The report is the work of the “Presidential Greatness Project”, conducted by the University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus and Coastal Carolina University political science professor Justin Vaughn. They gathered responses to their survey from 145 academics from multiple disciplines who interact with politics at some point within their work. The academics were asked to grade each president on a scale of 0 to 100 with 0 representing failure and 100 being great. Trump earned a score of 10.9 out of 100, placing him last. The top spot on the list went to Abraham Lincoln, who earned a score of 93.9 out of 100. For comparison, President Joe Biden was ranked at number 15 in his debut on the list.
“Trump’s impact goes well beyond his own ranking and Biden’s. Every contemporary Democratic president has moved up in the ranks – Barack Obama (No 7), Bill Clinton (No 12), and even Jimmy Carter (No 22),” writes Rottinghaus and Vaughn in an article explaining the list in the Los Angeles Times. Both professors say respondents were allowed to weigh in with their political leanings in mind. “Academics do lean left, but that hasn’t changed since our previous surveys. What these results suggest is not just an added emphasis on a president’s political affiliation, but also the emergence of a president’s fealty to political and institutional norms as a criterion for what makes a president “great” to the scholars who study them.”
Referring to Trump, even those scholars identifying as Republican had a low view of him with a ranking that leaves him “such lowlights as Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and William Henry Harrison, who died a mere 31 days after taking office,”
with them putting him at 41 out of the 45 presidents as Democratic academics put him last. “What these results suggest is not just an added emphasis on a president’s political affiliation, but also the emergence of a president’s fealty to political and institutional norms as a criterion for what makes a president ‘great’, Vaughn and Rottinghaus wrote.