Historians on Donald Trump

When historians and political scientists rank presidents from best to worst, Donald Trump invariably comes out at the bottom.

This year, to give one example, the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project released the results of a survey of 154 current and former members of the presidents and executive politics section of the American Political Science Association.

The highest ranked included no surprises: on a scale of 0 to 100, Abraham Lincoln (95.03), Franklin Roosevelt (90.83), George Washington (90.32), Teddy Roosevelt (78.58) and Thomas Jefferson (77.53).

Dead last: Donald Trump (10.92), substantially below James Buchanan (16.71), Andrew Johnson (21.56), Franklin Pierce (24.6) and William Henry Harrison (26.01).

There are other ways to rank American presidents, however: How consequential were they?

By these standards, Trump no longer falls at the bottom of the pack. That’s not necessarily a good thing. My view is that Trump is a consequential president for all the wrong reasons.

After the nation rejected the presidential bids of George Wallace, Pat Buchanan and David Duke, Trump demonstrated that the contemporary American electorate would put a candidate who appeals to voters’ worst instincts in the White House.

Trump has capitalized on the anger, fears and resentments of a besieged but fundamentally decent working class to exacerbate ethnonationalist hostility to immigrants and minorities, creating a right-wing populist antidemocratic movement.

In the process of building this MAGA coalition, Trump has made explicit the racist, anti-immigrant themes that have underpinned the Republican Party for the past half-century.

Persistently, insistently repeating election lies, subverting election norms, raising doubts about election integrity and refusing to commit to accepting the 2020 — or 2024 — vote count, Trump is focused on transforming the Republican Party into a cult with adherents willing to support a nominee who openly plans to undermine — indeed ravage — American democracy.

In that sense, Trump ranks high as a transformative president.

Read the rest here.