I propose that we gather together historical facts and engage in 'friendly' (you don't have to be friendly but remember that ultimately this is a bit about shitting on awful awful people) debate to decide who was the worst President in the history of the United States of America.
The bar is so fucking low and yet Andrew Jackson still manages to slip underneath it on the $20 he's printed on.
That's an easy one. George Washington started the damn thing so he must be the worst.
In before elementary school textbooks printed in Texas start saying that the Radical Republicans were fiscal conservatives who supported traditional family values while skateboarding and wearing neon sunglasses.
Trump. He disrespected the great office pf the President, the worst of all crimes.
:liberty-weeping:
Are we actually having a struggle session over whether Trump was bad in comparison to other presidents or not?
He started it. The bastard. And his personality cult is super cringey.
Idk the Thomas Jefferson personality cult is pretty bad, too.
Interesting to see where Jefferson would land. I mean yeah, he was awful, but what I mean is, more than any other president his fans love to cite what he said but never really what he actually did. That's because Jefferson was a feckless little shit who would write all the time about how slavery made him sad but then he'd go on to do nothing about it - whether legislatively or in his own personal life with the slaves he owned.
Dick Cheney was only president for a few hours while Bush was getting a camera shoved up his ass, so by this logic Dick Cheney was the greatest US president of all time.
Fair. Biden has only been president for like 15 days, so he is now objectively the best one ever.
But Harrison didn't have the ability to drone strike people half the world away in a matter of hours. Biden's body count as president is probably way higher than Harrison could even hope to achieve in that time.
Died from the stagnent poop water! I think I did a school report on his son Benjamin Harrison, also a very useless president.
Nixon and his war on drugs have directly ruined hundreds of millions of lives: increasing incarceration rates, disproportionately among black and brown people, thereby perpetuating slavery via prison labor and making a poverty cycle that's even harder to escape from the regular one.
Other neat downstream effects mean it's hard for a lot of people with disorders that are treated with stimulants (adhd, narcolepsy, depression, etc) to actually get medical care, and that we just don't use some drugs to treat things they've been proven to help with (like psilocybin for depression)
Herbert Hoover is up there, Andrew Jackson, Reagan, bush, for sure. Might get some hate for this but even though all the presidents did bad things some of the better ones were Grant and FDR, maybe carter, of course FDR did the horrible Japanese internment but my point is that among presidents they were the better ones.
Yeah feels like a lib answer but the New Deal is probably when the US was closest to being a functional state. Concentration camps are bad but honestly could be one of the less bad things US presidents had done to date?
I think worst for me is Reagan just bc his ghost is still fucking us over 40 years later. Hoover and Jackson are also up there. God they really don't tell you in school that most presidents fucking sucked huh
Hoover is somewhat complicated when considering his accomplishments outside of the presidency, and it has led to some academics arguing for a reevaluation or reclaiming of Hoover's legacy. Personally, I still think it's fine to shit on Hoover because nobody should get a free pass for essentially being a less-wholesome and wealthier Jimmy Carter precursor, but he did a lot of okay things.
Before getting in politics, Hoover was a mining engineer, metallurgist, and later a mining businessperson/consultant. He created the first English translation of the most significant metallurgical textbook ever written (De re metallica), which has also been recognized as the best translation of the work to a modern language. Hoover was raised in relatively modest circumstances as well (his father was a blacksmith in Iowa).
In World War 1, Hoover helped prevent the mass starvation of as many as 10 million people in Europe (primarily Belgians) by organizing and funding the Commission for the Relief of Belgium. Hoover remains a celebrated figure in Belgium today.
When ignoring his politics, Hoover is an interesting and possibly admirable figure until one considers how mining is the most damaging industry ever. The Zinc Corporation that he co-founded in Australia was taken over by Rio Tinto in the 1960's, and it's now known as the Rio Tinto branch that is responsible for the destruction of a 46,000 year-old indigenous archeological site (among other offenses). Capitalists never can have a good legacy.
TL;DR Hoover is pretty much a more conservative Jimmy Carter.
True, and that also doesn’t factor in Hoover’s deliberate non intervention in the Great Depression for 2 years and his deportation of up to 2 million Mexicans, many of whom were American citizens, which is pretty much ethnic cleansing
Yeah his presidency has too much shit to dive into, but I hope my comment at least illustrates how conservatives aren't embarrassed as hell over naming things like the "Hoover Institute."
Good point. I am not sure if he is completely comparable to Carter though. Hoover did objectively horrible things as a president and did some good and bad as a non president. Carter had some bad things out of his control happen that were resolved later (hostage crisis), and did some good and bad things as a president, but as a non president is a really upstanding person. I hate to sound like a lib but the man retired onto his modest peanut farm where he gave away most of his money and lived frugally since, I have never heard of billionaires or other such people willingly giving up that lifestyle for their lives. So Carter definitely wins out in both categories.
There's one billionaire, Chuck Feeney, who fairly recently managed to give away almost his entire fortune. He didn't turn it into a marketing/media circus like Bill Gate's masturbatory nonsense. Feeney primarily focused on giving to first world educational and health institutions so it certainly wasn't anything radical, but he managed to peacefully and quietly remove one billionaire from the world.
Pretty sure leftists here mostly hate Carter over standing by during the East Timor genocide rather than being a poor negotiator during the Iranian hostage crisis.
some of the better ones were Grant and FDR
Don't leave Lincoln out. Yeah his reasons for freeing the slaves weren't amazing, but he did it. Plus Marx wrote him letters of support which is cool.
I feel like Trump should be in the running
But Reagan was worse
I feel like he should get some sort of honorable mention for accelerating the decline of America
Look can we just admit that he was a horrible president and let me go to sleep?
A 9/11 every day.
Stop defending Trump. He doesn't need your help. He helped white supremacy rise again in this country. He had literally no plan for the pandemic, and defunded the department responsible for disease control. There have been objectively good things that happened during his presidency but they were few and far between. Other presidents sucked but Trump contributed significantly to the nightmare world I wake up to every day.
White supremacy was the policy in America for day one. It’s been in america forever. Trump didn’t change a damn thing about it, just embraced it openly
I don't think she would have done anything differently, but I think without Trump in office, the right wouldn't have galvanized into the movement it did, and wearing masks wouldn't be as much of a political issue. There would be the usual conspiracies about how the CDC wants to make every white baby autistic and gay, but Trump heightened the contradictions, as the kids say, in a way that made Q anon possible.
yes its very funny that thousands of working class people die of extremely preventable causes every day
Mate you can hate America and acknowledge it stands for pure evil while also seeing that their policy has endangered or killed hundreds of thousands of working class and people of colour, disproportionately in fact. Some 70 year old black man who dies from covid as a result of America shouldn’t be celebrated because he’s American
Trump was maybe the most clownish but he didn't amass the body count of Bush the younger or Andrew Jackson.
Lots of presidents would have racked up a covid body count comparable to Trump's had they happened to be in office. Trump made things worse but a lot of the disaster is caused by systemic factors like the lack of healthcare and labour rights.
The chuddy disdain for science and for doing anything to prevent the spread of disease were also there before Trump.
Surprised that Truman isn't at least in the running. I'm probably being delusional, but it feels like there was a moment after WWII that seriously good things could have happened if the USA didn't fasc-it the bed. Not to mention the nukes...
