Adding Trump to the rankings of US presidents
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C-SPAN has just updated its ongoing ranking of US presidents to include the former guy. Here’s the poll’s methodology:
In 2000, C-SPAN’s original team of academic advisers devised a survey in which participants used a 1 (“not effective”) to 10 (“very effective”) scale to rate each president on 10 qualities of presidential leadership: Public Persuasion, Crisis Leadership, Economic Management, Moral Authority, International Relations, Administrative Skills, Relations with Congress, Vision/Setting an Agenda, Pursued Equal Justice for All and Performance Within the Context of the Times. In 2009, 2017 and 2021, following a change in administrations, subsequent surveys have been conducted using these same 10 characteristics.
Surveys are distributed to historians, professors and other professional observers of the presidency who are drawn from databases of C-SPAN programming, research in the field and suggestions from our academic advisers. Each cycle, we reach out to past participants and add new names to the list to maintain a well-rounded list of invited participants. This year, 142 completed the survey, up from 91 in 2017.
Participants are guaranteed that their individual survey responses will remain confidential. No definitions are provided for the categories: participants are able to interpret them as they see fit to determine their rankings. Each of the 10 categories is given equal weighting in arriving at a president’s total score. Survey responses are tabulated by averaging all responses in a given category for each president.
Given the description above, this is evidently supposed to be an ideologically neutral exercise in evaluating presidents, which is by its nature an incoherent project. If, for example, you’re a proponent of authoritarian ethno-nationalist white supremacy, then Donald Trump was an extremely effective president in just about every way, since he advanced that agenda to a vastly greater extent than any previous president. (Obviously the evaluative metric of “Pursuing Equal Justice for All” would mean something quite different to an authoritarian ethno-nationalist white supremacist than it would mean to the supporters of political correctness cancel culture critical race theory.)
In this vein, I note with grim amusement that right wing hack Amity Shlaes has become the fourth member of this exercise’s distinguished Advisory Team, to add more “ideological balance” no doubt. Maybe they should get Nick Fuentes for the 2025 or 2029 edition, to make sure Hispanics and Holocaust deniers both have some representation.
Anyway, in his first appearance in the rankings, Donald Trump manages to finish fourth from the bottom, ahead of Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Pierce. (I’ve never understood why Pierce, who seems to me a complete non-entity rather than a malign figure in American history comparable to these other three figures, is consistently at the bottom of these lists).
I note that the rehabilitation of the catastrophic presidency of George W. Bush continues apace, as he has risen out of the bottom quarter where he was originally consigned, to rank next to Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford in the mediocre middle of the table.
In any event feel free to throw down over whether Benjamin Harrison deserves to be ahead of Rutherford B. Hayes etc.