07-01-2021, 03:23 AM
n 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.
Any kind of survey like this is limited by the nature of the particular categories that are presented to evaluate each president. There are probably a large number of other such ways of creating categories for evaluating the presidents and each different set of categories is going to shade the overall rankings because of the nature of the different categories putting more or less emphasis on important but different things. For example, none of the categories above explicitly mentions democracy and how the president functioned to support it. I think a good case could be made that supporting democracy is one of the most important things a president can do.
I think it is insufficient to evaluate Trump without taking major account of how hard he tried and close he came to having a successful coup against our democracy. The fact is that he tried really hard (and is still trying) to do so. The preface of our Constitution begins with these words, "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union..." I believe that in terms of equality of people and democracy we have been perfecting our union. I think that makes Trump's actions that much more relatively egregious. We have come so far from the beginning (though still a long way to go) in perfecting our union and this mentally ill man came way too damn close to undoing it all.
In a way it seems kinda unserious to try to ferret out the order of the worst presidents we have had. I mean, yeah there's a few that clearly belong at the bottom somewhere, but to try to put a number on where they fall is probably not all that meaningful. It depends too much on what you want to focus on and how much you value certain characteristics.