1. Abraham Lincoln
2. George Washington
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt
4. Theodore Roosevelt
5. James Madison
6. Thomas Jefferson
7. James Monroe
8. Harry S. Truman
9. Lyndon B. Johnson
10. Dwight D. Eisenhower
11. James K. Polk
12. Ulysses S. Grant
13. John Adams
14. Andrew Jackson
15. Woodrow Wilson
16. Barack Obama
17. William McKinley
18. Chester A. Arthur
19. John Quincy Adams
20. John F. Kennedy
21. William J. Clinton
22. William Henry Harrison
23. George H. W. Bush
24. Grover Cleveland
25. Jimmy Carter
26. Benjamin Harrison
27. William Howard Taft
28. Martin Van Buren
29. James Garfield
30. Calvin Coolidge
31. Richard M. Nixon
32. John Tyler
33. Zachary Taylor
34. Rutherford B. Hayes
35. Gerald R. Ford
36. Herbert Hoover
37. Millard Fillmore
38. Warren G. Harding
39. Getting hit by a bus
40. Franklin Pierce
41. James Buchanan
42. Donald J. Trump
43. Ronald Reagan
44. George W. Bush
45. Andrew Johnson
I feel like “getting hit by two buses” should be above Donald Trump.
Honestly it should been “Getting run over by President Taft.”
I hope I get this correct.
TR and Taft would wrestle each other often and with Taft being the bigger one usually won. TR was interested in martial arts and had an instructor teach him some techniques. TR was injured and couldn’t go so Taft and the instructor (much smaller than Taft) wrestle and he tosses Taft about the room.
…I hope you got that right, too
yeah, it was a story that one of my high school history teachers told.
Most of these I cannot challenge you about but Reagan if not the worst was at least bottom 3!
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/06/03/ronald-reagan-worst-president-ever
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-objective-reasons-ronald-reagan-was-our-worst-president/
Reagan, W, trump, and Andrew Johnson should be in a 4 way tie for worst.
Reagan sucks ass but it’s hard to put him below the Civil War racist presidents or W’s Iraq body count or Trump. I was not counting their post-presidential legacy (which bumps Carter way up and dumps Reagan even lower)
“Reagan sucks ass but it’s hard to put him below the Civil War racist presidents or W’s Iraq body count or Trump.”
No, it’s not hard at ALL,when you think of the millions who died of AIDS, because Ronnie Ray-gun was a goddamn homophobe, who didn’t want to help LGBTQ folks (and addicts, too!).
Reagan’s administration delayed getting the ball rolling on AIDS research,and the world lost the better part of an entire *generation* of gay men, too many kids with hemophilia, and millions of kids & parents world-wide, because Anti-Retroviral drugs & the drug cocktails that stop AIDS were delayed by probably a decade.
And then there were all the farmer suicides due to the farm crisis, and all the deaths because of Iran-Contra.
So fuck Reagan.
He deserves to be at the bottom,in that 4-way tie.
…would it not also be on his watch that the war on drugs really knuckled down to being a war on an inconvenient urban voting demographic?
You’re correct, it was *exactly* then.
Plus the whole racist “Welfare Queen” trope got it’s start–allowing white folks to delude themselves that the majority of us who were on welfare were *not* us white folks🤨🤨🤨
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/12/linda_taylor_welfare_queen_ronald_reagan_made_her_a_notorious_american_villain.html
And apologies, Black Rod💖, I just realized that my comment could be read as being angry at you, which is 100% NOT what I meant!!!
I just looooaaaaatttthhhe Reagan, and all the stupid, completely unnecessary deaths which people literally suffered through during his era.
I was a kid back then, who grew up stuck on the wrong side of Reaganomics, literally on welfare from the time I was a second grader, until I was senior in high school.
Reagan’s economic policies were utter horseshit, and so too, were his social ones.
He was a smoother-talking, less stiff Mike Pence, when it came to AIDS & drugs. And where Pence is only (so far, anyway) responsible for an AIDS epidemic in Indiana, which killed tens-to-thoudands, Ronnie Ray-gun can be blamed for literally Millions of deaths.
No worries, I didn’t take it that way, and believe me, I also think he sucks and is probably more responsible than anyone for our country being in the shitter. His popularity still boggles my mind.
Grant and HW Bush too high (and not the good high)
Grant is getting a bit of a reclamation project recently, although I don’t know how much he deserves it.
Part of it has to do with his push back against former Confederates and the Klan, trying to undo some of the damage that Andrew Johnson did, and I think that is fair. He definitely got a lot of bad propaganda thrown his way by Birth of the Nation types for trying to guarantee the rights of Southern blacks.
I don’t know whether his reputation as a tool of corrupt hangers on is justified, but he defnitely wasn’t free of grifters. He wasn’t aggressively anti-Indian like Andrew Jackson, but he was in office for a lot of the really awful ethnic cleansing in the West and didn’t really have a clue about how to stop it.
Having read some recent biographies about him, he was definitely naive about some of the grifters around him, but his reputation was tarnished far more because he fought very hard for newly freed slaves, against the solid Democratic South (of course) but also over a growing number in his own party who felt they’d “done enough” in the war.
are we missing one or is Cleveland only being counted once??
Only counted once.
good call. makes a better joke.
My (several)great-grandfather was his VP in his 2nd term…my aunt did our family tree old school style in the 70s but this was a known thing in my family and my grandparents hung his portrait.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_A._Hendricks
No shit! That’s cool. Nonconsecutive, but cool.
cool to have a VP on the tree but wish it was a better one…I don’t think there is anything in his record that I’m proud of.
Well! He should move up 1 for that!
Teddy Roosevelt is way too high! His policies in Asia were terrible and had severe consequences. Not to mention he was a racist and an advocate for eugenics. I confess to not knowing much about anyone else before Lyndon Johnson.
I mean, yeah, but FDR has internment and Washington owner slaves. They’re all kind of terrible!
True
TR can be tough to reconcile with today’s values but he is one of my favorites. He was a solid progressive and busted the monopolies of his day and would become a peacenick after his son’s death in WW1. The National Parks was nice too.
The GOP was affraid of what he was doing as NY Gov & tried to hide him as the VP. He didn’t care for McKinley or his policies and when they come to tell him that he had died and TR was POTUS he was said to have laughed because that was what the GOP was trying to prevent in the 1st place.
I don’t know Old Man, the Philippines, encouraging Japan to attack both Korea and China? I love the National Park system but those were disastrous.
This is my pet subject. I think TR was probably a “good” president the way we perceive Obama as being “good.” TR is such a huge figure that it’s hard to reconcile all the parts of him.
The shit he pulled on Korea and China though hoo boy and got a Nobel Peace Prize for it. All history makes history but his actions and secret deals with Japan, because he perceived them as racially superior, basically created WW2 in the Pacific.
Part of the problem with “he was a racist” is that TR is in a 43 way tie for last place.
…can we really be sure the bus isn’t racist?
…some of those older buses, now…they had some funny ideas
There’s a difference though between the personal racism of Lincoln and LBJ and the policy racism of presidents like Roosevelt, Reagan, and trump.
Hot Take: Washington is not a Top 10 president.
His policy of neutrality towards Europe was, at best, sheer impotence, and, at worst, designed to empower Hamilton to re-establish ties with Britain.
Since you asked:
Lincoln
FDR
Jefferson
Madison
Monroe
Wilson
Truman
Kennedy
LBJ
Teddy
Surprised by Wilson. Any particular reason?
His attempts to establish the League of Nations. It was a logical extension of American principles, but it was a pretty radical idea.
He’s an intersting POTUS and really held us out of war to the end of it. Not sure if he was the one to push for breaking up Germany but I associate that to him in my mind. I always think Prohibition when I think of him too.
Mrs Wilson is said to have run things after his stroke.
That’s absolutely true. She and his personal physician actively conspired to hide the effects of his stroke. If I recall correctly, she was signing correspondence in his name.
Heyyyyy making lists is my (stolen from Deadspin) corner!!!
(But seriously, GW gets bonus points for degree of difficulty. He had to set a lot of precedents and then graciously stepped aside and set that tradition.)
I will concede that Washington’s stepping down after two terms is, in and of itself, perhaps worthy of a top ten placement.
That said, I think Washington’s stoicism is overdue for a reappraisal. He was, in his nomination and his election, a compromise between rival visions of American government. Washington gets lot of credit for making safe and wise decisions, but arguably he was just delaying or hiding a very serious political divide that persists to this day.
Taft, Hoover, and Harding should not be above the bus. Bus was robbed.
Haha, I went back and forth on Harding and the bus. You might be right!!
Teapot Dome scandal
Harding gets bonus points for having the class to die during the scandal, though. (And yes, I would extend the same bonus to Mango Unchained should a blockage take him out. Looking at you, aorta!)
Clearly, no man on this list is a perfect human and as humans they contain multitudes. Lincoln absolutely deserves to be number one, though.
I appreciate the respect given to Chet Arthur. Underappreciated president. A rough start, but once he finally got around to taking the job, he did ok.
I forgot who wrote this about him (probably Sarah Vowell in “Assassination Vacation”) but he was a relatively honest broker as the head of the customs house in NYC, which was the best place for graft in the entire government. And then he pushed through a lot of civil service reforms after Garfield’s death. Also wasn’t a horrifying racist, just kinda racist! Underrated guy!