I just came across this:
It is easy to imagine [Trump] is the worst leader the US has ever had. It is a view endorsed by the American Political Science association, which canvassed some 170 historians who ranked Trump dead last—a largely bipartisan verdict, too, since even self-identified Republicans on the panel rated him fortieth against the forty-four other contenders. C-Span has conducted similar surveys of presidential historians in 2000, 2009, and 2017 (none of these, naturally, include Trump). The bottom ten in the most recent survey were James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren G. Harding, John Tyler, William Henry Harrison, Millard Fillmore, Herbert Hoover, Chester Arthur, and Martin Van Buren. (There were some shifts in the group over the three surveys, with, for example, George W. Bush making the bottom ten in 2009, but just missing the cut in 2017.)
My faithful readers will recall that I covered this story back in December, 2016, in a post which surely bears rereading. I reported:
It’s official. The American Historical Society announced today that it had taken a poll of its members, and there was surprising unanimity: Donald Trump is the worst president in American History. Well, actually, Donald Trump will be the worst president in American history, once he’s sworn in.
Unfortunately, the concluding paragraph was far too prescient:
Journalists attending the press conference at which the Society announced its conclusion went away puzzled. They noted that while all of the points the Society made about Trump were well founded as a matter of fact, that facts themselves clearly didn’t matter anymore, and that to them, Trump’s presidency was looking more normal by the day. Trump himself tweeted: “History on the way out. No one reads it and no one learns anything from it. So repetitious. Sad!”