People, Personas, and Politics 9 – Worst President Renewal
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): People, Personas, and Politics
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/03/27
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Rick Rosner: Starting with George Washington, he was both the worst and the best president ever. And then Adams was either going to be better or worse than Washington, but he was probably worse. Then there you go again, you’re living under the worst president ever. And then you can string together a whole bunch of presidents until you get out to Lincoln who is, I think, the 16th president, and then you get to, was it, Buchanan who was thought to be the worst president until Trump.
Buchanan as the 15th president, worst president. 20 years later, you have Ulysses S. Grant who was thought to be the worst president by many people. I don’t know the presidents in between. Rutherford B. Hayes was probably pretty terrible. You get to Warren G. Harding, who was thought by many to be the worst president ever. Though he had the courtesy to die after about 2.5 years in office. So the damage he could do was limited. Then you can move on, then you’ve got, some people – who I don’t agree with – who thought Carter was the worst president ever. Then you’ve got George W. Bush, who struck a lot of people during his presidency as being the worst president ever Then you have Trump–oh! You have Trump who seems to be on the way, if he keeps presidenting the way he has been, may become indisputably the worst president ever. But he’s one of a line of, say—he’s one of maybe 6 really bad presidents.
SDJ: Who would be the second-up for you?
RR: Well, I know the presidents of the past 100 years than the previous 100 years. So Harding seems really terrible. He ran a really corrupt administration. He admitted to being unqualified to be president. He was banging his mistress in a White House closet, though that doesn’t make you a bad president. He messed things up. Though when looking at presidents, you have to correct for how much they had to mess up.
Harding was presiding over a much smaller America without nuclear weapons. He was in the 1920s. There wasn’t as much risk in him being a screw up. On the other hand, if you look at Buchanan, who I think was the guy that led up to Lincoln, but did a bunch of bad politics that made the Civil War more probably, so he did a lot of damage. Then you look at George W. Bush, who was manipulated into lying us into a war.
An unnecessary war built on false pretenses that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, has led to the worldwide impression of the United States as not the shining beacon of liberty that we’d like it to be. So I don’t know.
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