Republican Presidents Ranked from Least Horrible to Most Horrible

Filed in National by on December 3, 2018

Abraham Lincoln,
Dwight D. Eisenhower,
Theodore Roosevelt,
William McKinley,
George H. W. Bush,
Gerald R. Ford,
Ulysses S. Grant,
William H. Taft,
Calvin Coolidge,
James Garfield,
Benjamin Harrison,
Rutherford B. Hayes,
Chester A. Arthur,
Herbert C. Hoover,
Warren G. Harding,
Ronald W. Reagan,
Richard M. Nixon,
George W. Bush,
Donald J. Trump

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Jason330 is a deep cover double agent working for the GOP. Don't tell anybody.

Comments (23)

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  1. puck says:

    GWB is still the most horrible. For Trump to catch him, two things have to happen: 1) the coming Trumpcession has to be worse than Bush’s Great Recession, and 2) Trump needs to start a war of choice worse than the Iraq war. I’ll grant that events set in motion by Trump may cause both these things after he leaves office, but only then will he be the most horrible.

    • Alby says:

      Gotta disagree. Trump’s destruction of political norms and the GOP make him the worst despite the wide scope of Bush’s fuck-ups.

      • puck says:

        The norms were destroyed by Reagan and then GWB. Trump simply walked through the breach.

        • Alby says:

          Gotta disagree. Granted, Reagan kicked off the battle over judicial appointments by nominating an ideologue in Bork, and GWB (really Cheney) misused intelligence to start the Iraq war. But neither one launched all-out attacks on the courts and the security agencies or appointed totally unqualified clowns to cabinet seats (well, Reagan had a couple, but they were better leashed than this pirate crew).

  2. Rufus Y. Kneedog says:

    Nixon and his treasonous prolonging of the Vietnam War puts him at the bottom for me. W and his Iraq War are next. I think he was manipulated into it by people smarter than he was but that doesn’t let him off the hook.

  3. jason330 says:

    There is a traffic jam at the bottom of the list. Nixon, Trump, Bush? It is like trying to figure out which cancer is worse – brain cancer, pancreatic, or acute myelomonocytic leukemia.

  4. MikeM2784 says:

    Hoover and Harding could be added to that logjam too really, Harding for corruption and Hoover for making the Great Depression, caused by Republican economic policies, worse.

    • jason330 says:

      Oh yeah. The bottom six are/were truly terrible.

    • AA says:

      I would disagree with this, next to Hillary Clinton, Hoover was the most qualified person to ever be President. He was the right man at the wrong time. The economy would have crashed under any president, be them R or D….

      • RE Vanella says:

        I guess that goes to show you how being the “most qualified” is actually the most insignificant quality for a presidential candidate.

      • Point of Order says:

        Can we be clear and understand that Hoover didn’t cause the Great Depression in the way that policies under Bush set up the Great Recession. In any event governments around the world didn’t understand that role government could play to ease conditions. Not so much asleep at the wheel; more like not knowing how to drive.

        • Alby says:

          Not quite accurate. He didn’t “cause” the depression, but plenty of people told him the government needed to step in, which he refused to do because of his party’s anti-government stance, which has continued down to the present day.

          More like thinking three lefts equals a right.

  5. At least TR was a conservationist. He should be ranked above Eisenhower. Ulysses S. Grant was, at one time, considered the worst president ever. But the entire field is so mediocre, save Lincoln and Roosevelt, that it’s hard to make a case that he should rank lower.

    BTW, the insufferable Peggy Noonan was on Morning Joe this morning, waxing rhapsodic about Bush and, of course, Reagan. Couldn’t turn it off fast enough.

  6. pissedinnewark says:

    Reagan was the engineer of what led us to Trump. Dismantling a lot of New Deal reforms, warring on the environment, refusal to act on the AIDS crisis, creating the modern Middle East conflicts…I would put Reagan at the bottom.

    • Nixon and his henchmen were the architects of the Southern Strategy, an appeal to all the racists. Remember ‘The Silent Majority’? Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the entire Republican Party message was built on racial resentment. It continues to this day. As Lindsay Graham said, there just aren’t enough old angry white guys any more.

      Once everybody who should be allowed to vote is actually allowed to vote, THAT Republican Party is dead forever. That’s why voter suppression and gerrymandering are the only tricks they have left. Except, of course, for Russian intervention.

  7. Alby says:

    You have listed Chester Arthur far too low. In his time he was considered very successful.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_A._Arthur

    I’d put him at No. 5.

  8. nathan arizona says:

    Agree with Alby. Trump wants to destroy the whole framework (which I guess would make the anarchists happy). It was possible to recover from Nixon and W and start setting things on the right track. There’s no recovery from what Trump wants to do.

    And I believe Garfield wasn’t all that bad, except for getting himself killed.

    • Alby says:

      An argument can, and has, been made that Garfield was the most qualified person to ever hold the office. One good thing that came out of his assassination was the end of the spoils system, because the man who killed him was a deranged party supporter who thought he was owed a job because he was personally responsible for Garfield’s election. That ended the practice of every new president spending months filling thousands of government posts and led to the civil service we have, or had until Trump ran riot.