It was announced last week that C-Span had surveyed a group of 142 historians to rank all the Presidents in American history, and lo and behold Trump came out fourth from the bottom.
Isn’t it obvious there’s something wrong with that?
It’s not that James Buchanan wasn’t, as one article put it, a “bungler.” Nor that Andrew Johnson was a racist who squandered much good that Lincoln might have reaped from his victory in the Civil War. They are surely among the worst. (I’m not sure what Franklin Pierce did to be in such company.)
But worse than Trump? How could they reach such a conclusion?
The answer seems to be that C-Span employed a seriously flawed methodology.
Here’s how C-Span derived its result (as reported in the New York Times):
The scores, rendered by over 140 independent historians looking at 10 criteria like “crisis leadership” and “performance within context of times,” range from 897 (out of a possible 1,000) for the top-rated president, Lincoln, to Buchanan’s 227. Mr. Trump got 312.
So with those “10 criteria,” they’ve put together a kind of Presidential decathlon. Doing poorly in one event can be counter-acted by doing better in some other event. As the Washingtonian reports:
Trump’s highest scores were in public persuasion and economic management—ranking number 32 and number 34, respectively. But he ranked last in moral authority and administrative skills and close to last on international relations, crisis leadership, pursuing equal justice for all, and relations with Congress.
But when it comes to evaluating someone like Trump, it simply won’t do to say, “Golly, he was such a good public persuader that he gets elevated from the bottom of the list. Hitler was extraordinarily good at “public persuasion,” too, but that hardly should exempt him from contention for “worst person in human history.” On the contrary, it just made him all the more dangerous and destructive.
With a President like Donald Trump, the scoring should not be like in a decathlon but should be, rather, like how driving tests sometimes get scored. As it says on the website “Understanding Driving Test Scores,”
Something that is illegal or dangerous will result in an immediate fail for the test. This means you can score 99% in the test and still fail. Therefore it is possible to fail the driving test when you only make one mistake.
C-Span’s methodology doesn’t take into account that “illegal and dangerous” captures the essence of Trump’s Presidency.
No President before Donald Trump has tried to destroy the American constitutional order itself (and come dangerously close to succeeding). He was impeached twice, but even so most of his impeachable offenses went uncharged. No President refused to accept defeat, nor launched an insurrection to overturn a legitimate election so he could hold onto powers that the American people had duly decided to take from him.
This goes beyond bungling.
This goes beyond all of Andrew Johnson’s sins.
This is in a class by himself. And Trump’s place in the presidential standings should obviously be at the very bottom.