Warning: The following may make your head explode
Trump: The Greatest President of All Time?
I am the greatest! Donald Trump is clearly thinking about his legacy. He has been attaching his name to an extraordinary range of things in Washington: a huge new arch, a stone marker at the White House helipad site that he chose himself and said would last a million years, his name and face on limited-edition passports and national park passes, and a commemorative $1 coin set to be released soon.
The list keeps growing. There’s the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace, a class of Navy battleships bearing his name, and his signature on new U.S. paper currency. There are also the Donald J. Trump/JFK Center for the Performing Arts and an effort to rename a Ford-class aircraft carrier after himself rather than Doris Miller. Earlier this year Trump sought to have Washington’s Dulles International Airport and New York’s Penn Station renamed after him. Banners bearing his picture now hang on most federal buildings in D.C. There’s TrumpRx, Trump savings accounts, Trump gold cards, and the Donald J Trump International Airport (Palm Beach). He even asked the owners of the Washington Redskins (er, Commanders) to name their new stadium after him.
The obvious question is how many of these names will survive once he leaves office — especially the ones a future president could simply change.
The president had already made his feelings about his predecessors clear with the “Presidential Walk of Fame” that he installed at the White House (whitehouse.gov/walk-of-fame).
And now comes the latest bit of chest-thumping: a post on “Truth” Social in which the president declared himself the greatest president in history. I kid you not (see the post).
The Original “Greatest”
Calling yourself “the greatest” inevitably calls to mind Muhammad Ali, who proclaimed: “I am the greatest! I’m the greatest thing that ever lived. I don’t have a mark on my face, and I upset Sonny Liston, and I just turned twenty-two years old. I must be the greatest.”
So was Ali really the greatest heavyweight of all time? My dad would have said Joe Louis. But looking at the boxing rankings, one expert observed that “the heavyweight division is comfortably the biggest — quite literally, but also figuratively — and most exciting in the sport,” since anything can happen in a single moment. Below is that expert’s ranking of the ten greatest heavyweights (givemesport.com/boxing):
Ranking factors included:
- Overall record
- Titles
- Ability in the ring
- Level of opponent
Ali was first:
- Muhammad Ali
- Joe Louis
- Larry Holmes
- Rocky Marciano
- George Foreman
- Joe Frazier
- Lennox Lewis
- Jack Dempsey
- Wladimir Klitschko
- Mike Tyson
Personally, I would have found room for Jack Johnson and Evander Holyfield somewhere (a top twelve?). But of the lists I checked, all of them had Ali first and Joe Louis second.
Where Presidential Historians Rank Trump
What about presidential rankings? I would guess that most of the people compiling them are not Trump admirers and even in responding to a scientific survey, biases come through. Almost every historical presidential survey had always placed James Buchanan dead last. One of my best friends has a remarkably amazing nine-year-old son who says Buchanan deserves that spot. In his words: “Buchanan didn’t try hard enough to stop the Civil War. His biggest accomplishment was just stopping a small battle. He could have done more.” A noted presidential scholar essentially said the same thing, citing Buchanan’s “failure to address the escalating tensions over slavery, which ultimately led to the Civil War,” and pointing to his handling of the Dred Scott decision and the Kansas-Nebraska Act as having “aggravated sectional divisions and undermined the Union.”
But what about Trump? Is he the greatest president of all time in the opinion of those who study the presidency? There are two surveys of presidential scholars that rank the presidents. There is the C Span 2021 survey in which nearly 100 historians and biographers rated the former US presidents. The 2021 Presidential Historians Survey, which was released after Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, measured 10 quantities of presidential leadership: public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, relations with Congress, vision, pursued equal justice for all, and performance within the context of his times. Biden was omitted because he had not finished his term. Trump was ranked 41st. You can see all the results here:
https://www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2021/?page=overall
What about if Biden were included? Where would he rank and where would Trump rank? A 2024 survey by professors Brandon Rottinghaus (University of Houston) and Justin S. Vaughn (Coastal Carolina University) reported the results of a survey of 154 presidential historians to score every president on a 0-to-100 scale. Lincoln finished first, at 93.87, with FDR second and Washington third. But Buchanan lost his familiar spot at the bottom — because Donald Trump took it, with a score of just 10.92 (read the full report).
Most people I know (me included) would strongly disagree with the experts who put Obama #7, Clinton #12, Biden #14, Reagan #16 and Carter #22. But again most historians lean to the left. This poll shows that their bias even if it claims to be “scientific.” I would have put Biden last – move over James Buchanan – because in my opinion he is the least consequential of all presidents. I would have switched Reagan and Obama and then put Carter ahead of Obama. But I am not a presidential scholar. Due to personal dislike, I would have lowered Teddy Rosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Andrew Jackson. Regardless. there is no way Trump is last. He certainly makes the top 10 as one of the most consequential presidents of all time. Putting him last is an indication of bias and not dispassionate analysis.
A Final Thought
I’m not here to render a verdict — rankings like these depend heavily on who is doing the surveying and who is responding – although this one does try to survey the universe of presidential scholars. I make no judgments. I know it all depends on who writes the history. I have told of my rebelling (no pun intended) against the history being taught to me while at the University of Georgia that was light years different from the history I had been taught in high school and by my parents. I don’t know if southern history books still teach the “lost cause” but I reject that as a means to excuse slavery.
So will Trump end up being the consensus (amongst presidential historians) the worst president in history? Probably. Regardless, but there is no debate, however, that both those who idolize him and those who despise him will rank him as being one of the top 50 presidents of all time. But the greatest?
haroldblackphd.com 