CT Blue

In what should come as no surprise a panel of experts polled by the Los Angeles Times opines that while Biden is a respectable 16th best in the list of presidents, Trump is dead last:

Trump’s position at the bottom of our rankings, meanwhile, puts him behind not only Buchanan and Johnson but also such lowlights as Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and William Henry Harrison, who died a mere 31 days after taking office.

Trump’s impact goes well beyond his own ranking and Biden’s. Every contemporary Democratic president has moved up in the ranks — Barack Obama (No. 7), Bill Clinton (No. 12) and even Jimmy Carter (No. 22).

Being as this is reported by the mainstream media, the Times goes on to cast doubt on the conclusions of its own selected experts, but not to the extent of casting doubt on the conclusion about Trump.

I take this occasion to point out that I reported Trump’s dismal standings in this blog many years ago, on December 20, 2015 to be exact:

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.

“There was a bit of debate about whether we should declare him the worst before his inauguration”, an Historical Society spokesperson said, “but in the end, we reached consensus that there was really no reason to wait, since he was such a clear winner….er… loser”.

Trump replaces George W. Bush as the Society’s worst president ever. Bush, unlike Trump, was not a unanimous pick for the highly coveted award. A history professor from Bowdoin College held out for Franklin Pierce, stating that while he saw the merits of the argument for Bush, as a matter of institutional pride, he felt it was important to stick up for a Bowdoin alum. That same professor was recently quoted as saying that “next to Trump, Pierce looks like Lincoln”.

The professors pointed to a variety of reasons for their unanimous decision. “We’ve had mentally ill presidents in the past”, one pointed out, “but you can argue that Lincoln’s occasional depression was part of what made him great, and while Andy Jackson was a bit of a megalomaniac, he simply can’t compare to Trump. ”

Another pointed out “that there’s no indication that any other president ever solicited payments from foreign powers, something that the constitution forbids, Trump has been pretty open about it, and then there’s the whole collusion with Russia thing prior to the election. It appears that a foreign power will have something on the president of the United States, and that as a result he may be forced to do its bidding, though I do admit that if the collusion did come out, it’s quite likely that Congress would do nothing about it.”

Many also felt that using the presidency for personal enrichment was a bit tacky, to say the least. Others pointed out that while there have been ill prepared presidents in the past, no prior president has ever lacked so much of the basic knowledge needed to do the job. “This guy makes George W. Bush look like a genius”, noted one historian.

Others pointed out that while most former presidents, with the possible exception of George Washington, sometimes told a lie, Trump will be the first president who has never told the truth.

I hereby confess that I made it all up. But it all turned out to be true, didn’t it, including the part about Republicans not giving a damn about him subverting the constitution and kowtowing to Putin, and now the experts agree.