Ranking Trump from The New York Times

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. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. 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. A 2022 paper, “Donald Trump and the Lie,” by Kevin Arceneaux and Rory Truex, political scientists at Sciences Po Paris and Princeton, provides a case study of Trump’s impact on American politics. The authors studied “the evolution of public opinion about Donald Trump’s ‘big lie’ using a rolling cross-sectional daily tracking survey” from Oct. 27, 2020, through Jan. 29, 2021. They found: The number of Republicans and independents saying that they believe the 2020 election was fraudulent is substantial, and this proportion did not change appreciably over time or shift after important political developments. Belief in the lie may have buoyed some of Trump supporters’ self-esteem. “Republican voters reward politicians who perpetuate the lie,” Arceneaux and Truex concluded, “giving Republican candidates an incentive to continue to do so in the next electoral cycle.” I asked a range of experts on the American presidency to evaluate Trump in terms of impact. Their answers varied in terms of substance, tone and the level of harshness of their assessment of Trump’s policies, rhetoric and initiatives. For a number of presidential scholars, Trump represents not an innovative force but rather a revival of — and capitalization on — the darker strains in this country’s history. Marjorie R. Hershey, a political scientist at Indiana University, Bloomington, wrote in an email: I’d rate Trump as a significant president. Not a great president or even a good one, but significant in that he has pushed a movement to reverse many of the gains in acceptance of diversity that have been so hard-fought in recent decades. “That’s not new,” Hershey declared, adding: In some ways, Trump is a modern-day version of the grisly race baiters of the Old South in that he’s understood that whipping up fears and hatred and stimulating chaos allows those with real power to accumulate more profits while the rest of the public is busy hating and fearing one another. Nor, Hershey contended, is Trump a political genius: It’s not that Trump is a brilliant politician. He’s just met his time. So many people’s anxiety level has been increased by 9/11 and other terrorism and Covid and, especially, rapid sociodemographic change. Nativism has long shadowed U.S. politics, but the speed of this particular change, in which the population has dropped from about 85 percent non-Hispanic white to less than 70 percent in just a few decades, has raised some pretty base fears. Along similar but not parallel lines, Lori Cox Han, a political scientist at Chapman University, where she directs the presidential studies program, wrote to say that “Trump could definitely be called transformational, but in a negative way.” The nation, she added, has never experienced a president (or ex-president) who has been this disrespectful of the Constitution, the rule of law, the norms of the office or just basic decency. So yes, I would say that he has shifted the common understanding of what is good and sensible and that he has gravely damaged principles and values within the Republican Party on issues such as foreign policy and immigration, transforming it into something unrecognizable to where the party stood during the Reagan years. Clearly, Han concluded, “Trump is still a significant presence in American politics, but he has turned much of the traditional discussion about presidential leadership on its head.” Thomas B. Edsall