It’s a popularity contest among 150 academics. A group that has swung hard against Republicans recently.
But really regardless the current president shouldn’t be on these. And not that it has come up before but current candidates probably shouldn’t be on there either.
I think in 30 years we will see Biden’s first term as much more politically successful than Trump’s, and probably Trump’s as more influential as a break from Reagan/Bush conservatism. Historians will weigh these two things against each other and I bet we see Biden well above Trump but we don’t have enough information, it’s too soon.
I’m no scholar and Trump should be somewhere in the bottom-10th percentile for sure, but that Andrew Jackson isn’t dead last discredits the entire thing, honestly.
Andrew Jackson was an evil bastard, but he was also very effective.
He successfully paid off the national debt, was highly-successful navigating foreign affairs (including avoiding a war with France), brought Arkansas and Michigan into the union, and was partially responsible for Texas joining through covert arming of Texan revolutionaries. His last act as President was to formally recognize the Republic of Texas, which was the first step towards its annexation.
The Indian Removal Act earned him a special place in Hell and tainted his legacy forever. But he had some successes. Trump’s only real achievement was being President after the Republicans had refused to appoint any federal judges, so even his single political success came down to Mitch McConnell being effective in the Obama years and RBG dying at the right time.
Him paying off the national debt caused the longest and deepest (by percentage not dollar value, great depression wins there) depression in US history.
We were founded as a country of traders, and by paying off the national debt, we removed the dollars that other countries had to buy stuff from us. This crippled our economy for well over a decade. I wouldn’t call that effective, unless you think he was actually trying to sabotage the country, which I wouldn’t put past him.
That’s the thing. He was evil, but effective. What did Trump even accomplish aside from stacking the Court, which really had nothing to do with him?
If a politician does something harmful that I hate, that’s not necessarily the save thing as being a bad or ineffective President. Plenty of bad people are effective leaders, and plenty of good ones are not.
Jimmy Carter was probably the best person to ever be President, and his stances on environmental issues were decades ahead of their time. I love Jimmy Carter.
But he wasn’t a good President because he couldn’t get anything done. Andrew Jackson did.
That’s why I say Trump should forever be stuck at the 45th percentile of presidents. He was mediocre at best, and a useful tool at worst.
Yeah those are fair points but I just personally kind of think the whole genocide thing immediately sends him to the bottom, independent of his efficiency elsewhere. Scholars seem to be over-thinking it if not whitewashing here.
If Trump were to have had a chance at a genocide, he’d have jumped at the opportunity. I firmly believe that he’d have directly started carpet-bombing Gaza if he were in office a few months back.
What about Buchanan?
He was pretty mediocre as a president really. Put him in the 45th percentile, and keep him there.
Also Wilson is arguably worse than Jackson, but not by much
to be truly fair it should be only ranking any president who has died more than 26 years before the poll date. That allows for all their classified documents to be declassified and their legacy to be truly dissected.
Old smart guy or demented criminal - it’s a tough choice, eh?
Old demented criminal.
Lower approval rating than every president going back to Eisenhower at this point in their presidency.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/
But hey 154 “current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association” ranked him 14th!
Maybe go look at what the data you’re actually memeing is next time?
You can be great at what you do without being popular, especially when how popular you are is based on the opinion of an extremely divided population that’s influenced by media that try to make people angry at anything and everything to generate more clicks so they sell more ads.
That’s why we listen to the opinions of experts, not random Joes. Just go to a townhall meeting to listen to the average person and their take on what cities should do.
In a democracy the opinion of the people matters.
When making a list based on the accomplishments and not popularity, the opinion of the majority isn’t what matters.
Its a list based on personal opinions of “greatness” not accomplishments
The primary purpose of this survey was to create a ranking of presidential greatness that covered all presidents from George Washington to Joe Biden. To do this, we asked respondents to rate each president on a scale of 0-100 for their overall greatness, with 0=failure, 50=average, and 100=great. We then averaged the ratings for each president and ranked them from highest average to lowest
When people in a democracy decide they want a dictatorship their opinions won’t matter a bit.
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Recently Biden forgot that we wanted to send WEAPONS to Ukraine and AID to Gaza. Ooopsie, little mishap there!
I imagine something in his head like:
See the weapons + aid go to Israel, no wait it was Russia wasn’t it, and the bombs we will drop on… Congress? It’s so hard to keep track!? :-P
On the other hand, I can only imagine what goes on in Trump’s head is like:
hamburgers hamburgers hamburgers bewbs hamburgers chikin nuggers
(slightly edited to make it SFW)
TRULY the WORST timeline! :-(
Trumps brain is more filled with
I hate PoC, leftists should be put in camps, I wonder if Jared can get more money from Israel if we let them kill the muslims, will China let us set up a new factory if we sellout Taiwan, Putin said he would give me $50 million to pay off the mob loan sharks if I let him invade Ukraine
But obviously without such clear wording and thought patterns.
I dunno, maybe the first time, and certainly his handlers think so strategically - even Hitler himself reputedly didn’t really care so much about concentration camps, he just said “yeah sure why not?” when someone floated the idea (obviously there’s additional complexity there).
My point though is that Biden isn’t the only one having “senior moments”, even though I hear about Biden having those easily 100x (1000x?) more often than Trump having one - the idea of fair reporting of “news” is LONG dead it seems:-(. (Thank goodness Jon Stewart is back though!!!:-P)
Edit: oh, I found one! (where a mainstream news organization reports an example involving Trump rather than focusing more exclusively on Biden) From the good old Guardian too, usually a source that I can count on, at least in the past: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/03/trump-confuses-obama-biden-virginia-rally.
Go watch Biden on Seth Myers last week and tell me he has dementia after that.
That’s… not how dementia works.
First you have “bad days”.
Later you have “good days”.
Then and only then do some people finally start accepting what may have begun decades ago in the past.
Source: clearly I must have dementia too, if that is the only way to know that one has it? :-P
BTW, I never said, nor even implied, that he has dementia. I mentioned that he has trouble recalling things, from time to time, and that in a crucial matter that might be relevant. Crucial matters do not come at you only at scheduled times of your choosing and which you can cancel if you need to. Whether it goes all the way to full-blown dementia or not though is not for me to say. Oh, I just looked up the definition of dementia - so yeah I guess I am saying that to me, it looks he has dementia:-). But what I mean is that whether it’s a 1 on a scale of 100, or a 10 or a 20 or whatever, I could not begin to say, just that I am worried that it is not zero.
Though so too does the other guy - and his might be up to sth like 80 at this point - so I’m not talking about “both sides-erism” and I’m so fucking tired of pretending that the only things that ever exist are the two extremist polar opposites of one another, with literally nothing else allowed to exist in the vast gulf between them. Whether I say any of this or a mod removes it or whatever, people are still worried about it regardless - it’s a real worry.
That said, he and his team have greatly surpassed my expectations from his first term and I hope I get the chance to see how well that combo performs in his second, even though I suspect that the part of it that involves “him” will diminish greatly.
