Comment by spanhandler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spanhandler | Hacker News Reader

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Eh, sure, but those who are uncommonly inept, corrupt, and ineffective and also not very recent tend to end up down at the bottom, crossing political boundaries. Unless we have a run of exceptionally awful Presidents then I think when enough time has passed, we're likely looking at one of those situations. There's a certain class of President who ends up being widely considered to be quite bad, not so much because those ranking them disagree with what they stood for, but because they were ill-suited for the Presidency and were just... bad at the job.

FWIW I think this despite not even thinking he's the most damaging recent President, by a long shot. Yes, even with the whole COVID thing. I'm pretty sure The Other Guy's (I hesitate to distract by naming him) easily safe from ever being lumped in with the notoriously-poor-at-Presidenting set of ex-Presidents—Trump, I think he's got that label in his future.

"widely considered" by the biased haters who write history?

Whatever they say, the opposite is usually true. When they say "bad at the job" that should be read as "good at the job". Likewise, when they say "good at the job" it means "bad at the job".

People with sense and a love for America do not often become history professors.

Ok, but for one thing I only put that in there to provide the perspective from which I was hating on the article, and for another I agree that that’s typical and my point is that I don’t think we’re dealing with a Carter or a Reagan or even a Nixon, in terms of historical judgement, but, like, a Buchanan or a Johnson (and no, not LBJ)

[edit] to illustrate: it’s 2080 and you’re a politically-motivated hack historian making a worst ten Presidents list. Do you list 10 political enemies? No. You make 5-8 uncontroversial safe picks, and 2-5 are your political enemies. My contention is that, due to his effectiveness in and execution of the office, Trump is likely to eventually land on a lot of those lists due to being in the “safe pick”, legitimacy-lending category, not the political one. Meanwhile, yes, he’ll be on those plenty for political reasons for the next decade or three.

Not that he was great, but the vilification of Nixon is disproportionate. It's clear where historians would place him relative to Obama, but Nixon didn't weaponize the intelligence agencies (state assets) against a political opponent. Doctoring evidence to present to a FISA court in order to spy on a political campaign is far more corrupt than anything Nixon was ever accused of.

Despite that, you're quite correct about how historians will rank presidents. Mainly that tells us about historians, but inverting the ratings is almost correct.

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