Is Trump the worse president ever?

Is Donald Trump the worse president ever?  In 2019, CBS News commissioned a poll of 91 noted historians who determined that yes – he is.

While many may agree with the assessment – it is filled with personal biases and dislikes.

How can 91 noted historians rightly and accurately judge a president’s total work when they all have lived through the president’s first three years and have been personally impacted by some of his actions.  It is suspected that many of them did not vote for the president and instead voted for someone whom they felt was a better choice.

A noted local historian said recently, that any survey of contemporaries is a problem since they have their own personal biases and that should be taken into context when quoting the 2019 survey.

Another problem with the 2019 survey of presidents concerns social changes since the last survey.  Another similar survey taken in 2000 by C-Span shows how the current culture wars have a major impact on presidential surveys by historians.

In the 2000 survey, Washington was named the greatest president followed by Lincoln.  In the 2019 survey, Lincoln was named the greatest and slave-holder Washington was knocked down to second place.  Where Jefferson was named fourth in the 2000 survey, he was relegated to seventh place in the 2019 poll.  The biggest fall from grace based on the two surveys concerned Andrew Jackson.  Jackson was named sixth on the 2000 poll and fell out of the top ten into the middle of the pack in the 2019 survey.

Another observation of both polls show how significant it was to have been president in the last half of the 20th Century.    Truman, Reagan and Ike made the top 10 in the 2000 survey.  Truman, Ike, Reagan, JFK  and LBJ all made the 2019 Top 10.  Fifty percent of the greatest American presidents of all time served as president in a 50 year period of the 20th Century.  That seems to me to be a generational bias.  In other words, those 91 Historians voted for presidents they knew rather than take the time and compare 19th Century presidents and the country they lived in.  At best, this is a biased group and at worse, it’s a lazy group.