Fox News reported on some new presidential rankings, which purportedly show Barack Obama as the #6 president in U.S. history and Donald Trump dead last, and MAGA was not happy.
Fox News on Sunday posted an article about the new rankings by the Presidential Greatness Project, which Fox describes as “a group of self-styled experts.” It states that Abraham “Lincoln topped the list of presidents in the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project expert survey for the third time, following his top spot in the rankings in the 2015 and 2018 versions of the survey.”
…
“Rounding out the top five in the rankings were Franklin Delano Roosevelt at number two, George Washington at three, Theodore Roosevelt at four, and Thomas Jefferson at five,” according to the report. “Trump was ranked in last place in the survey, being ranked worse than James Buchanan at 44, Andrew Johnson at 43, Franklin Pierce at 42, and William Henry Harrison at 41.”
The report states that Obama and Joe Biden “ranked an average of 6th and 13th, respectively, among Democrat respondents, and 15th and 30th by Republicans.”
Jackson is not in the bottom but Harrison is? People need to read some history books. Dying 35 days into your presidency is worse than a genocide?
The fact that he is still on our currency is insane enough
I wish I could like this more than once.
I’ve always thought that Harrison should be ranked much higher in these lists. If you equate his presidency with “doing absolutely nothing,” then logically he should rank above all of the presidents who actively harmed the country/world. And there are quite a few of 'em.
Let’s get tee shirts “Harrison was #1”
Confuse the shit out of people
George was pretty great.
Pete is my favorite Beatle.
Billy Preston is my favorite Beatle.
Pete was Best.
Drew was my favorite beetle.
Kinda funny that William Henry Harrison managed 41st place, considering he was only president for a few weeks in 1841. Considering the rankings were voted on by “self-styled experts”, part of me wonders if they did that on purpose.
Also took me a moment to realize why the list includes 46 presidents (up to Biden) but only has 45 rankings. For anyone else who’s wondering, it’s because of Grover Cleveland’s non-consecutive terms making him both the 22nd and 24th president.
Harrison wasn’t around long enough to fuck anything up. In this list, that’s helpful.
Yeah, but imagine how much higher Trump would have been in the kist if all he did as president was catch pneumonia and die?
If he did that in his first term I might consider voting for him later this year
Someone just tell Donny that this scoring was like golf. Lowest score wins. Winning!!!
Seems very on-brand for that bunch. They are always angry.
I wonder what Trump plans to do about it, other than whinge. Get reelected by abandoning Fox News and using tRuTh sOcIaL instead?
Substantially so, he is the worst president in US history. He can hug all the flags he likes, but at the end of the day he’s for Donald Trump not the United States
Buchanan was pretty terrible. I’m shocked that Trump was ranked even worse than him. He literally sat on the fence and let the country literally fall apart because he was afraid to do anything. Many think he could have avoided the civil war had he acted, but he was coward in the wrong place at the right time.
Trump sucks, easily in the bottom 5, and I could see an argument for him being the worst. But you have a big hill to climb to make the case for him to be substantially worse than Buchanan.
Honestly Buchanan wasn’t a great president, but I don’t think it really would have mattered what actions Buchanan could have taken.
By the time he got into office civil war had all but been guaranteed as decades of kicking the can on the issue of slavery, combined with increasing resentment in the divide of the north and south culturally. Had created a powder keg that arguably was lit back during the start of bleeding Kansas years before he even became president.
And with how stubborn the south was on not letting go of slavery, well there really was no diplomatic solution by then. Hence kicking of the can all those years prior. Maybe he could have enacted decisions that delayed the war, but it would have only been a delay.
The only way civil war could have ever been prevented is if the founding fathers had told southerns to pound sand and outlaw slavery back during the signing of the constitution. That or maybe if the cotton gin had been invented a decade later
I’d give it even odds that Trump ends up the proximal cause of the loss of the Republic. Easily the worst president in our history, and if reelected, the final president in our history.
Don’t know US history- sounds like Buchanan did nothing, didn’t avoid war. Trump actively went out if his way to cause division, push the country to civil war and enticed conflict from other states.
I guess it really depends on how it plays out. But, that being said, it wasn’t so much that he did nothing but that he fence sat the entire time, just bidding his time so the next person could deal with it. . .and the country fell into a civil war that killed 2.5% of of the population of the country. That’s a pretty bad outcome.
Remember Covid? We would have been better off if the buffoon would have sat on a fence, but no, he actively made it worse causing so many unnecessary deaths. He is by far the worst president ever and it’s really not even a debate. He’s sold classified information, caused an insurrection, and the list can literally go on for days. If he was president 100 years or so ago, he would have long been dead from being hung as a traitor.
Buchanan made the country worse through inaction, no doubt about it.
But Trump was by far the worst in how he actively tried to make the country worse for his benefit. Every other president has at least something they tried to do to improve the country. Trump only did things that benefited him personally.
Trump also made the world a worse place.
Spoiler: he’s not done
Can you briefly explain why we would have wanted to avoid the civil war? It freed the slaves and killed lots of slavers, didn’t it?
It also killed a lot of non-slavers and innocent civilians. Yes, slavery ending was a good thing, but there were possibly better ways for it to get done.
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I get that you’re quoting A Clockwork Orange, but out of context, this breaks rule 6 for advocating violence. Removed, 24 hour ban.
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Ronnie Raygun sez…hold my beer.
This breaks rule 6 for advocating violence. Removed, 24 hour ban.
Both of those people are dead lmao
This breaks rule 6 for advocating violence. Removed, 24 hour ban.
I wouldn’t say Obama is a top 10 president but he was a good president.
Meanwhile Trump was objectively a terrible president - a venal, mercurial, criminal narcissist who sold out his allies and whose incompetence managed to kill hundreds of thousands of people during a pandemic and capped off his term with an insurrection. Not enough history has passed to judge exactly where he is in relation to some other terrible presidents but I reckon he’ll be in the bottom 3 for sure.
What are 10 presidents that are better than Obama, according to you?
Not the other guy but ill throw out a list of mine.
- Theodore Roosevel
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Harry Truman
- JFK
- LBJ
- Abraham Lincoln
- Thomas Jefferson
- Martin Van Buren
- Jimmy Carter
- George Washington
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This aint an organized list, just those I considerr better than Obama. Also using Washington is a bit of an asspull on my part but I dont care.
Ok, thanks for sharing.
I’d be hard pressed to name 10 presidents that were better…
Edit: would love for someone to give me an actual list (with actual reasons for the non-obvious ones. The only person who even attempted so far didn’t name 10, and included famous KKK supporter (member?) Woodrow Wilson, so…
You might not but there are plenty of lists that do and give their reasons. The likes of Lincoln, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Washington, Wilson, Kennedy, Reagan, Lyndon Johnson are frequently listed ahead of him and for some obvious reasons. Obama might squeak into the top 10 of some compilation lists, maybe higher if people only consider modern presidents.
Lol Wilson? Ummm…
Also, no way Reagan deserves to be ever close.
Argue with the scholars who made the lists, not me
I mean ok I will…
But I don’t remember asking for 10 presidents that scholars think were better than Obama. That’s literally their job, I’m sure they could have discussions on the topic for countless hours.
I was asking you, a normal American citizen in the year 2024, to name 9 presidents that were better than Obama (and the reasoning would be nice, but I know the caliber of discussion here, so I won’t hold my breath).
Besides, if you’re going to put a Wilson on the list, it should probably be Edith, as she essentially ran the county while good ol’ KKK Woody was stroked out and incapacitated. Something the public wasn’t fully aware of until much later. We have laws governing who assumes control in such situations, but I guess fuck all that shit, right? Good presidents don’t lie about being incapacitated while their wife covers for them.
People like to attach Wilson’s name/legacy to the League of Nations (which the US never joined, and ultimately failed), and tend to rank him highly entirely for this reason, ignoring all of the awful and racist shit he did. And yeah maybe that was par for the course at the time for rich old white dudes, but that’s exactly why he doesn’t stand out among his peers enough to be top 10 imo.
TL;DR - I wasn’t looking for some scholar’s list, but just a normal US citizen in (current year) for a top 10 that is actually well informed and well reasoned, and doesn’t include Obama. I think most people would be hard pressed to do so.
At this point I’d be happy to take an average American that can name ten presidents that don’t include: Trump, Bush, Obama, Biden, or Clinton.
I bet you would be.
Go ahead and do it then. I think we’re both probably a bit too old for the whole “lul you can’t name all of the presidents” shit, but hey if that’s all ya got…
Or you can go ahead and do it. Make me look like an idiot.
And tell me why you think the non-obvious ones that you pull out of your ass deserve higher on the list.
I think it is less a judgment of how good Obama was buy rather an indictment of how bad (or inconsequential) most presidents have been.
That being said, the executive branch was really only as powerful was it is today rather recently. For the majority of the US existence it was just another bureaucratic office of government.
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Raw Story is garbage. Not because it’s partizan, but because it’s lazy.
“MAGA freaks out…” is 3 people responding to a fox news tweet identified by their twitter handle, another who’s not even identified that way, and some other rando who doesn’t agree. That’s it, that’s the story.
IDK what kind of sweatshop the reporters working for that outlet are laboring under, but there is nothing in this “article” that couldn’t be hammered out in 10 min on a smartphone.
Just because it’s lefty garbage, doesn’t mean it’s not garbage.
Step 1: Put out outrageous conspiracy theories or policies on twitter
Step 2: Wait for crazies to comment and create a high engagement shitstorm
Step 3: Now you can reference those outrageous things on mainstream media
…
Step 4: Profit
Step 5: ArmageddonThat is basically the schtick that every tabloid and every partisan site puts out. Visit the Daily Mail (actuall don’t) and every other story is some garbage from social media that they’ve decided to turn into click bait.
And so it is on lemmy as well. Don’t believe me? Check out Hexbear or .ml or lemmygrad. Same rage, different flavor.
so it is on lemmy as well
Painting an entire federation with the actions of its worst is fun. It’s like how all americans are Ted Bundy.
Isn’t that the same thing as saying ACAB?
Painting all of a thing the same color because of A portion of a thing is never a great idea, but here it’s implied I’m not talking about everyone that uses it. Just the loudest part and the part that had the authority to remove those they disagree with.
Which is pretty much the same as cops.
Check out Hexbear or
Ah damn you, I’ve been banned already just for viewing your comment!
ROFL! I wouldn’t be surprised.
Narrator: it was actually the exact same flavor
there is nothing in this “article” that couldn’t be hammered out in 10 min on a smartphone.
Bonus points if this article was published while on the can.
Sad thing is: it’s generating clicks regardless of how crap the article is, because that title is just so bait-y. :(
Manufactured outrage is the new thing though. Without it- I’m pretty sure lemmy would be a ghost town.
Ummm… It’s not new. Noam Chompsky may have gone off the deep end here in the last few years, but he had a point when he wrote that book in 1988, about events that happened between ≈1960 till ≈1980. This is a well known political strategy that has been used by multiple countries since 1898 when William Randolph Hearst declared, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”
The only real “new” part is that we now have the ability to network so inefficiently that we constantly form echo chambers, emboldening the fringe elements, allowing them to connect to each other extremely efficiently, and maybe allowing the people that are supposed to be watching, to actually watch. I suspect the last part is severely corrupted though.
This is absolutely unprecedented for Fox News to publish. Normally they’re praising the Republican Party so hard that you could see their political bias from space. Has Hell frozen over or is this some kind of editorial fuck-up that’s going to make heads roll?
Imagine admitting that Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States, was the sixth-best president in US history.
Someone pointed out that they worded their reporting on the article in a way that seems like Trump and Reagan were in the top ten right behind Obama. I’m sure they’ll find a way to twist it in their favor.
They deal in fear and anger
They’re reporting on the results of someone else’s survey; so they can protest indignantly.
Everyone debating the outcomes but no one’s talking about the criteria the list is based on. What criteria they used has to be discussed before we can debate why we think it’s wrong or if a particular president should actually be here or there.
Just assume the criteria is not being a corrupt, lying, incompetent, democracy-hating puppet of belligerent foreign enemies.
Then Harrison would be in the middle of the list, not the bottom.
I mean by what positive metric would how dumb ass even rank highly in?
Inherited wealth.
Don’t tell me that isn’t a positive in life.
According to the Fox article it’s based on survey. I was hoping there was a more objective set of criteria based on policy, action, corruption. In which I still think trump would mark last but it just hits different having scholars asking people their opinions vs scholars sharing their own opinions and why.
The respondents were asked to rank presidents on a scale of 0-100, with 0 being a failure, 50 being average and 100 being great. Rounding out the top five in the rankings were Franklin Delano Roosevelt at number two, George Washington at three, Theodore Roosevelt at four, and Thomas Jefferson at five.
Respondents were also tracked by their political affiliation and ideology, which the release argues did not “tend to make a major difference overall” in the rankings, though there were some outliers, mainly with recent presidents.
The Fox News report was teased on social media with this tagline: “New presidential rankings place Obama in top 10, Reagan and Trump below Biden.”
Seems like an understatement.
Gives the impression they’re all in the top 10 so it’s doing its job
Honestly Andrew Jackson ought to be way down at the bottom too
Yeah genocide and he has a personal body count from dueling while in office.
If Trump gets a second term, things like Jacksons “Indian Removal Act” and other horrible acts will be a minor issue in comparison.
Jackson is pretty complicated. He did so much heinous shit, but he also did a lot to keep the south in line in the early 19th century. Middle if the pack is usually a fair place for Jackson.
I think genociding natives outweighs keeping the south in line enough to put him at the bottom
You’d think so, but here we are.
Guess whose portrait they had hung in the oval when Trump took over the job?
https://time.com/4649081/andrew-jackson-donald-trump-portrait/
The conservative outlet noted that the figures were based on a survey of **154 respondents **[…]
That’s… Not what we call a statistically valid sample size.
Its so tiresome, because none of this shit is going to matter once the next Big Hurricane wipes a few more Gulf Coast cities off the map. The “Best/Worst” Presidents are all yet to be written, not set in stone by some dipshit Frank Luntz poll of 50-something ivy league academics.
People are going to be looking back at the Obama/Trump/Biden Era as absolutely utopian, with the way our economy is pitched. Its the Kamala Harris / Greg Abbott / Beyonce / Tucker Carlson presidencies you’re really going to have feelings about over the next thirty years.
TBH, once the really hard consequences of climate change hit–blue ocean events, mass die-offs of fish across all oceans, dust bowls in regions that are currently bread baskets, etc.–I don’t think that most people are going to be worrying about a president at all.
If humanity is lucky, we’ll all die from a previously unclassified pathogen from melting arctic ice. If humanity is unlucky, it’s going to be death from a century of famines.
I don’t think that most people are going to be worrying about a president at all.
We worried quite a bit about the President during the last 30s-era Dust Bowl.
If humanity is lucky, we’ll all die
Its not the end of the world. Its the end of a particular way of life. As the old world dies, the new world struggles to be born.
No, it’s not the end of the world; the planet will shrug humanity off and continue without us just fine. The world will do just fine, right up until the sun turns into a red giant and the expanding corona envelops this planet and burns it away, in a few billion years.
It will probably be the end of civilization as we understand it though.
More primitive civilizations have endured more desperate conditions.
We are not more primitive civilizations. We have culturally forgotten most of the things that are absolutely necessary for more primitive cultures to survive, and there are not nearly enough people have have any of these cultural memories to pass knowledge on at a meaningful scale. Tribes in sub-Saharan Africa might be able to survive, if climate change doesn’t wipe out their prey animals. Same with certain tribes in Brazil, assuming that temperatures don’t go past 95F for wet-bulb temperatures in the Amazon.
But we’re not them.
We have culturally forgotten most of the things that are absolutely necessary for more primitive cultures to survive
Developing large agriculture surpluses and potable water reserves, while expanding safe arteries of travel and maintaining peaceful coexistence with our surrounding neighbors?
there are not nearly enough people have have any of these cultural memories to pass knowledge on at a meaningful scale
Global literacy is at a historical peak. And methods of archiving/distributing information have never been more diverse or prolific.
Tribes in sub-Saharan Africa might be able to survive, if climate change doesn’t wipe out their prey animals. Same with certain tribes in Brazil
They’ll be some of the first to go, precisely because they don’t have industrial agriculture or advanced pluming and A/C.
Note, that is not 154 random people on the street. That is 154 US academics specializing in presidential politics, a much smaller total population.
That’s not the way that I read that. If that’s true, then the phrasing was very unclear.
I did not read this article in particular, but the actual report: http://www.brandonrottinghaus.com/uploads/1/0/8/7/108798321/presidential_greatness_white_paper_2024.pdf
Respondents included current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is the foremost organization of social science experts in presidential politics, as well as scholars who had recently published peer-reviewed academic research in key related scholarly journals or academic presses. 525 respondents were invited to participate, and 154 usable responses were received, yielding a 29.3% response rate.
Trump is the most damaging traitor in American history.
Trump sucks but Benedict Arnold sucked so much his name became synonymous with traitor.
Benedict Arnold got in a position to be traitor by being a war hero. Even as a traitor , he followed his conscience.
Trump got in his position by being a real estate grifter, playing shell games with New York City real estate, hiding income to take multiple properties through bankruptcy while having a positive income, not paying contractors and employees, etc. Out of vanity he paid to host his own “reality” show then somehow stumbled into connecting with half the population through outrage and misdirection who nevertheless elected him president. Somehow this narcissistic incompetent bombastic sleazy salesman commanded enough popular support for the Republican Party to worship at his feet, be afraid to contradict his words. Somehow this treasonous buffoon spouts sexist garbage worse than what got Clinton impeached but that’s ok, supports our Cold War enemy and current yet people are ok with it, reduces government services while enriching himself and his family, incites an attempt to circumvent the election but people still want to choose him, actually says he will act as a dictator yet there’s still support, damaged the ability of our government to function but that’s cool, started trade wars out of spite or impulse yet no one objects, then there’s the matter of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths by contradicting his own public health advisors on how to handle an epidemic
Trump has done worse damage.
Says the person not currently haunted by the spirit of Benedict Arnold’s leg.
So far
Sure, he was a traitor for a period, and did some pretty horrible things during that time (such as the invasion of Quebec) but he did end up restoring his original loyalties eventually.
Im not sure he’s going to be alone in that category much longer
think of it this way. noone outside America knows who that is.
everyone knows who Trump is
Imagining: the British have a statue to Benedict Arnold with the inscription “loyal” on it that they throw a towel over every time American tourists walk by while innocently whistling
modern day media has a big impact on that, also you being part of that history.
Go read about Benedict Arnold. He was actually kind of a hero iirc that fucked up.
He lost almost all his battles, picked a fight with every fellow officer around him, and committed treason because they wouldn’t let him openly be a war profiteer, everyone else having the good sense to hide their corruption. His naked ambition, greed, and open jealousy are simple historical fact.
There’s a fair enough point that losing battles and winning the war is just how the Revolution was, so he might well deserve more credit for military competence than his record implies, but Arnold did more than “make a mistake” by trying to sell West Point to the British.
Also, just fyi:
After defecting to the British he burned the city of New London to the ground and executed the garrison of Fort Grinswold after they surrendered.
Wasn’t he actually very patriotic? He just hated the French that bad.
The guys who won the Revolution for us?
Sounds like his “patriotism” was British.
Give it time.
Benedict Donald sounds right
The Revolution managed to succeed anyway. We’re still not sure our democracy (flawed as it is) can survive Trump.
So eventually I can expect there to be a kickass way to cook eggs named after Trump?
Nah, it’s gonna be Steak Trump, which is just any steak with McDonald’s ketchup on it.
Nah it would be one of the souls of the thousands of unsold sneakers with ketchup on it.
I took to calling a well done steak with ketchup “Presidential”.
Well done steak is understandable for older folks raised in a tiny town. My mom eats it well done because they didn’t even have fridges. Better make sure it’s well cooked so you don’t get sick. Some people cook it beyond well done where it’s getting into charcoal territory, that plus ketchup is what I call ala trump.
This doesn’t describe me but I prefer my steaks well done. The thing is, it’s harder to do a well done steak right than most other levels of done-ness because there’s less leeway (basically there’s a wide spread where something is medium rare, but a fine line between well done and shoe leather). Usually the trick is to stop cooking it shortly before you think it’s actually done and then let it rest covered to finish from the residual heat.
The ketchup thing is just gross though. Mix a bit of red wine, worcestershire, soy sauce, garlic, onion and store-bought steak sauce and cook it a bit to let the wine reduce, let everything mix and thicken it a bit.
Cube steak.
If by ‘kickass’ you mean ‘shirred in shit’, yeah.
Trump Eggs : rotten to the yolk.
(And small. Very small.)
If you serve me something trump-style, I will assume it is overpriced, poorly made, and possibly not even food.
Don’t forget the side of hair
The irony is that ‘trump’ used to mean overcoming, or offering something better than the previous offer. Originated from the word ‘triumph’. The common term was ‘trump card’, but it’s also a verb. In all cases, it was a positive idea.
Now I can’t even bring myself to use it during card games.
In the UK, ‘trump’ means fart.
And that you didn’t pay whoever made them.
And made by someone that isn’t going to get paid.
So McDonalds.
Not even remotely. Without massive help from the Republican party, he would have gotten nothing accomplished. Despite being the second coming of Reagan. Even Reagan was far worse than Trump. The collective efforts of the Bush family over the last 100 years dwarf and are also part of Reagan’s legacy.
Don’t get me wrong. Trump is awful. The Republican party is the problem however. They could stop him at a moment’s notice and kick him out. But they refuse to simply because their monster got away from them. And he’s currently got control.
You’ve put the cart before the horse. It’s trump who controls the republicans. It’s the republicans who need him, not the other way around. It’s he who has co-opted them. And, no, Reagan, evil though he was, did not damage the Republic like Trump has. Bush, the insipid fool that he was, hasn’t attempted to bring down the Republic. Trump very nearly succeeded in doing that. In destroying America. And he very well might still achieve it.
Nope. Literally it isn’t. They could kick him to the curb at any point. If he’s controlling them, why did he do largely what they wanted in office. Yes they throw red meat to the morons too. But make no mistake as to who’s in control. It’s still the same wealthy people who were before.
All Trump has done is give the permission to openly be themselves. They’re still the same crazies they were before he got in office.
The Republican party is the problem however. They could stop him at a moment’s notice and kick him out.
So, we have a two party system because FPTP voting always collapses into one given enough time. But there’s no requirement that those two parties be “Democrats” and “Republicans”, especially not as you know them now.
The GOP is worried that Trump’s cult is large enough that if they tried to boot him out directly that it would cause a massive party split of the sort that leads to a decade or so having three parties (and Democrats winning a lot because the right wing vote is split) until either the GOP or MAGA comes out on top and absorbs the other - and they aren’t sure MAGA wouldn’t win that in the end.
It’s better for the GOP long term if they let him tucker himself out or ideally get criminally convicted of things that make him ineligible under 14A Sec 3 in the hopes they can fold much of the cult back into their numbers but keep them politically active. If he gets barred under 14A Sec 3 then the GOP can get cultists to vote for them under claims that they’ll fix that, and then just not bother to.
That’s cynical thinking and it’s untrue. He can do a lot of damage in the interim. It would be worse than 20 to 30 years in the wilderness. Especially seeing as a Democratic party isn’t a solid cohesive group itself. It’s already a coalition party. And if there were less pressure to force a lot of us together, we’d split into other parties ourselves and pursue goals that actually align with our beliefs. For a lot of people including myself. Democrats simply represent a slower, slightly more humane slide into fascism.
We’re literally staring down the barrel at the end of democracy. As they try to play chicken with the lead addled losers they’ve engineered. Thinking to themselves “hey, maybe if we keep our heads down and keep enabling them we can be in charge of whatever is left someday” That shit isn’t rational, or reasonable. Especially considering how many Democrats would sorely love to work with them again if they just kicked the greasy toad to the side of the road.
