On the poll, kind of torn between Buchanan and Bush. Bush was really bad, but Buchanan was just totally worthless. Harding also deserves some consideration.
Harding and Pierce both.
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I voted Trump. Itâs not every election you have a Russian asset trying to topple the US Govt from the inside.
Also true. It was an election year. Fox would have been nonstop about how Clinton wasnât doing enough to stop the virus and was responsible for thousands of deaths. Timeline would have been way less dark.
It was John Tyler, btw, who supported the confederacy as a former US president. He presided over the Virginia Secession Convention and was a member of the Confederate Congress. At least he wasnât actually president though while supporting an armed rebellion against the United States. That honor alone belongs to Trump.
Nixon massively increased bombing.
But didnât LBJ also massively increase the level of engagement in the conflict basically every year he was in office? It is totally reasonable to presume he would have listened to the same experts who told Nixon bombing the shit out of the Ho Chi Minh trail was the key to winning the war.
Thread title isnât who would have been Worst US President of All Time If My Auntie Had Balls, or Who Was The Worst Human to Become President.
Plus, LBJâs civil rights stuff helps him out.
Yeah thatâs true and even though I brought it up, comparing what Nixon did in his first term to what LBJ would have done in his second doesnât really make any sense. Because LBJ didnât run for re-election because he probably wouldnât have won, because his Vietnam policy was a disaster. And increasingly unpopular.
Like, would Nixon have started the Vietnam war if he had beaten Kennedy? Who knows. But in any case itâs fair to point out that Nixon bombed the shit out of Laos and Cambodia and arguably sparked the Khmer Rouge. Although itâs inarguable that the whole 20 year conflict was instrumental in triggering that genocide, so maybe Nixon gets too much blame and LBJ and the French donât get enough.
Good arguments for Reagan, Nixon, and Bush ITT. I think Trump is definitely worse than Bush, if only because if we swap them we get a worse 9/11 response from Trump (if thatâs even possible) and a better pandemic response from Bush. I mean he was the one who started preparing the U.S. for a pandemic and would have at least acted like a leader and not politicized it. A lot of the stuff Nixon did was terrible but maybe Reagan should get the title because he really set us up for the horrid Bush/Trump presidencies while at the same time being remembered as some sort of saint-like figure by many.
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I guess having a film star become President began the populist race to the bottom currently being won by Trump.
Iâve got everything you need to know about how awful Reagan was right here.
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One issue in ranking the presidents is deciding whether amount of damage done, or just level of sheer incompetence, is the best measuring stick. Clearly Trump is 10 rungs below anyone else in the latter category, which also meant he couldnât really accomplish as many bad things as, say, Reagan.
Like, for example, if Trump had shrewdly managed to devise a national health care plan that somehow gives us all worse care, funnels even more $$ into corporate hands and discriminates heavily against brown people, then brilliantly obtains bipartisan support for it and gets it pushed through Congress, does that make him âbetterâ or âworseâ than him being a lazy clown who spent 3 years promising to release his plan in two weeks, cartoonishly trying to pass off binders of blank paper as work, etc.?
I am sympathetic. I agree that Reagan was a turning point because coming out of the 70s it wasnât a foregone conclusion that Boomers would adopt a Thatcherism/Reaganism belief structure but that is exactly what happened. The massive shift to a deregulation, privatization, âgreed is goodâ Boomer culture is directly the root cause of many of the worldâs biggest problems (climate change, runaway income inequality, catastrophic failure of shared institutions like health care). One push back I have seen is that Reagan didnât cause those things, he was a symptom of those things. But I donât buy it. He single handedly wrapped those destructive ideas in an easy to consume package. It was a time for choosing indeed, and he presented them with a disastrous option. The results speak for themselves.
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US and UK are somewhat extreme, but these things were what was happening and it was probably because of something like the financialization of the economy.
Thereâs a chicken and egg on financialization, but Reagan-Thatcher didnât start that.
I agree, but to me its kind of like watching someone throw kerosene on a small house and then saying itâs not that personâs fault the house burnt down because he didnât start the fire.
Not sure of any bad things being connected to other presidents that would not have been made worse with Trump.
Remove president xyz and leave everything else the same around them. It will be worse in every conceivable case.
This makes him king of kings.
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Another thing is that, unlike bombing campaigns, the President isnât in charge of the economy. They donât set the tax rates. They donât make laws about organizing unions. One phone call and the bombing can stop. Simple as that. Thereâs nothing that more directly lands at the feet of the President than when we are murdering people abroad.
Of course Reagan has lots of blood on his hands in that department as well.
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In the case of Reagan I fault him more as a cultural figure that inspired a whole generation to lean in to their most sociopathic instincts, rather than faulting him for executing any specific power of the office. Presidents shape public opinion far beyond the legislative power of the executive.
Also to blame:
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