Daily History "Hack"
Worst. President. Ever.
As the old year comes to an end (and it has gotten really old), it is time to reflect on one of the oddities of the year, the commander in chief of oddities, Donald Trump. It has always seemed odd to me that commentators and news anchors always refer to him as the “most controversial” or even “worst” president in “modern” American history. The reason they do this, I have
come to conclude, is that they know that they know too little of American history to weigh in on the question whether he was the worst in all of American history. So they just avoid this question with a rhetorical sleight of hand.
And yet, it is an important question, one not to be avoided. Our national history of 231 years is a very long time and it is something to be the generation that had to endure the worst ever president. It is something, especially, to acknowledge and learn from. It is not to be ducked.
The only commentator that I have noticed present this correct judgment forthrightly is the Lincoln Project cofounder, Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES). Schmidt brilliantly and rightly, on Twitter and on television, hammers this point home with regularity, and he is a national treasure for doing so. To be the worst president means to be an abnormal president par excellence, a dangerous breaker of norms, a warning that must never, ever become a precedent. In other words, neither he or anyone remotely like him, can be elected president without a real danger to the survival of our Democratic Republic.
How can Schmidt, and we, we say with confidence that Trump is the worst? This is where history comes in handy. We have had incompetent (Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Zachary Taylor) and corrupt presidents (Richard Nixon, hitherto sui generis) before. It also is not unique to have presidents who are racist (nearly all the presidents before Harry Truman, and a couple afterwards), financially felonious (Warren Harding) or dangerously antidemocratic and vulgar (Andrew Johnson). We have had presidents personally patriotic but unaware of the graft conducted behind their backs (Grant, Truman and Eisenhower, the latter two to a degree) What we have not had is a president who combines all of these transcendently awful characteristics in one person. The point is that it is not just a sight to see. It is a pernicious, poisonous precursor of fascism. American need to pick up their dictionary and learn its definition, and then their history books to understand its threats.
How can we not see that Trump’s character is an unalloyed mix of the venal, financially and politically corrupt, incompetent and authoritarian? The seventy four millions who voted for him recently, after more than four years of experience in a sound and light show of unprecedented transparency, either are fine with fascism or inexcusably ignorant of both it and the basic responsibilities of citizenship. Only Andrew Johnson was fine with authoritarianism over African Americans, but even he had tender feelings for the voting and Constitutional rights of white Southerners, if for no others. Johnson bought Alaska from the Russians; he did not sell America out to Russia. After he was impeached it was so clear that he could not win reelection that he slunk away and did not seek renomination by his party. Trump, puppet of Putin, and corrupter of the Constitution, was impeached, then renominated by his party in a cult of personality (not even bothering to front a political platform), and only defeated in the Electoral College by 43,000 votes.
Our Republic obviously remains at grave risk. The risk is political apathy and abysmal historical ignorance. It constitutes a pandemic unprecedented in our history, one that no vaccine outside ourselves can cure.
So, Andrew Johnson, you can step aside as America’s hitherto worst president, for no reason of your own for which you can boast. Some generations have had to endure presidents unworthy of them, as has been noted. But none until ours, has had one so spectacularly, so obviously unqualified and dangerous, yet embraced by a near-electoral majority. None has been spared removal from office after impeachment and yet nearly re-elected in the noxious Electoral College.
It may be that Americans “don’t know much about History.” It’s time for them to start learning.