A little over a week ago, conservative columnist David Books penned a column about The GOP: Trump Came For Their Party But Took Over Their Souls. “[T]he party of Eisenhower, Reagan and McCain is just stone cold gone— and not only among House Republicans, but apparently among their Senate colleagues too. My progressive readers are now thinking: Have you not been paying attention? Donald Trump has owned this party for years. If he told them to kill the immigration compromise because he needed a campaign issue, they were going to kill that proposal. To which I respond: I don’t think you quite understand what just happened. This wasn’t just about Republicans cynically bending their knee to Trump. Rather, I’m convinced that Trumpism now pervades the deepest recesses of their minds and governs their unconscious assumptions. Their fundamental mental instincts are no longer conservative, but Trumpian.” Again, this guy hasn’t been paying attention. Souls? The GOP? Ha! He noted that to assume their new personas they had to agree to 5 core MAGA principles:
Democracy is for suckers
Entertainment over governance
Foreigners don’t matter
Lying is normal
America would be better off in a post-American world
Senior Pennsylvania Congressman Charlie Dent was one of the first to say “not interested” and bail. He was first elected to Congress in 2004 and had built up considerable seniority, especially on the Appropriations Committee. He was also chair of the Ethics Committee. In 2014 the Democrats didn’t even run anyone against him. It only took one term with Trump as president for him to bid his colleagues a fond adieu. In 2020 he endorsed Biden for president and two years later he endorsed Josh Shapiro against MAGA crackpot Doug Mastriano in the Pennsylvania gubernatorial election.
Katie Tur asked Dent to comment on Brooks’ column. He didn’t hold back. “Too many Republicans have embraced the isolationism, the nativism, the protectionism of Donald Trump. It’ really a major problem for this party. But what’s even worse I think is that when Trump says these things about abandoning NATO and letting Russia walk in, he’s advancing Russia’s and China’s foreign policy objectives. “Useful idiot” is frankly too gentle a word to describe Donald Trump when he talks about Russia. It’s very sad to me to see too many members of my party inCongress embracing this very destructive and dangerous isolationist view.
That said, this is President’s Day— and can you guess who has been rated the worst president in history by the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey? As usual, the top 5 are Lincoln, FDR, Washington, Teddy Roosevelt and Jefferson. I was surprised to see Obama at # 7, Clinton at # 12 and Biden already at # 14! The bottom of the barrel though didn’t surprise me at all:
40- Warren Harding
41- William Harrison
42- Franklin Pierce
43- Andrew Johnson
44- James Buchanan
and the 45th best… in other words the absolute worst:
Donald J Trump, who scored even worse than he did last year. Based on a possible score of 100 (Lincoln, FDR and Washington were the only ones to score over 90), Señor Trumpanzee rates 10.92. He and Buchanan (the right-wing closet case who is blamed for starting the Civil War) are the only two with under 20 points.
In an L.A. Times OpEd, Justin Vaughn and Brandon Rottinghaus wrote that the survey “has seen a pronounced partisan dynamic emerge, arguably in response to the Trump presidency and the Trumpification of presidential politics… Trump, meanwhile, maintains the position he held six years ago: dead last, trailing such historically calamitous chief executives as James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. In that and other respects, Trump’s radical departure from political, institutional and legal norms has affected knowledgeable assessments not just of him but also of Biden and several other presidents.”
Proponents of the Biden presidency have strong arguments in their arsenal, but his high placement within the top 15 suggests a powerful anti-Trump factor at work. So far, Biden’s record does not include the military victories or institutional expansion that have typically driven higher rankings, and a family scandal such as the one involving his son Hunter normally diminishes a president’s ranking.
Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall.
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).
Yes, these presidents had great accomplishments such as expanding healthcare access and working to end conflict in the Middle East, and they have two Nobel Prizes among them. But given their shortcomings and failures, their rise seems to be less about reassessments of their administrations than it is a bonus for being neither Trump nor a member of his party.
Indeed, every modern Republican president has dropped in the survey, including the transformational Ronald Reagan (No. 16) and George H.W. Bush (No. 19), who led the nation’s last decisive military victory.
Academics do lean left, but that hasn’t changed since our previous surveys. What these results suggest is not just an added emphasis on a president’s political affiliation, but also the emergence of a president’s fealty to political and institutional norms as a criterion for what makes a president “great” to the scholars who study them.
As for the Americans casting a ballot for the next president, they are in the historically rare position of knowing how both candidates have performed in the job. Whether they will consider each president’s commitment to the norms of presidential leadership, and come to rate them as differently as our experts, remains to be seen.
Yeah, November’s election— because the GOP primary is a foregone conclusion, the voting participants being enamored on two things: authoritarianism and being conned. They found their man. He swallowed that party right up. Down? In either case, He “is,” wrote Michael Bender, “stamping out the final flashes of independence inside Republican institutions with astonishing speed, demonstrating that his power continues to expand over the new party establishment he has created… [D]isplays of obedience emerging in recent weeks [from both the House and Senate] remove any lingering doubt that the Republican Party is aligned to advance the interests of one man, signaling that a sweep of victories from Trump and his allies in November could also mean replacing checks and balances in Washington with his wishes and whims. For many Republicans, those aren’t risks but the rewards of a second Trump administration. Only a rapidly dwindling minority inside the party remains worried about Trump’s intentions.”
