Donald Trump

If you read through the page on this site listing the presidents from who I deem the best to who I deem the worst, you'll see that there are two presidents I've exempted from my ranking: William Henry Harrison and Joe Biden. Harrison is exempted because he died only 1 month into his presidency. Consequently,. he didn't do a single real thing in the office. A president who does nothing due to a lack of time in office cannot be seriously judged. Similarly, Biden hasn't completed his presidency, so there's still time for him to become either extremely good, extremely bad, or something in-between. He, like Harrison, just hasn't had enough time.

Donald Trump almost became one of the presidents exempted from my ranking. After all, he was president just a little over a year ago. This means that the country - and the world at large - hasn't had a tremendous amount of time to witness the full impact of everything he did in office. However, and I might seem foolish now and/or in the future for saying this, I feel like much of what he did as president was so unique and consequential that its impact can be easily discerned at the present moment. So, I have included him in my ranking.

2017, the year Trump entered office, oversaw some of his most vile decisions. It was that year that he issued a ban on all immigration from the countries of Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, North Korea, Libya, and Sudan. As an advocate of open borders, I find this decision appalling. However, even if you support restrictions on immigration, I think you should still be able to criticize this decision. There's a huge, fundamental difference between restricting immigration from a country and outright banning it. Warren G. Harding's Emergency Quota Act was restricting immigration from certain countries. Donald Trump's decision here was outright banning immigration from certain countries. Furthermore, the countries he prohibited immigration from are all ravaged by severe sociopolitical issues, making life there nightmarish. He was actively denying asylum to millions of people who desperately need it. That year, Trump also banned transgender people from serving in the military, which is an atrocious violation of civil liberties.

Trump also routinely showed his disregard for climate change, one of the most severe crises our species has ever faced. As president, he withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Accords, an agreement signed by Barack Obama - alongside several other world leaders - in which the participating countries agreed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by a quarter before 2030.

Another important negotiation Trump shamelessly and recklessly pulled out of was the Iran Nuclear Deal. Also signed by Obama, this agreement required the US to lift all sanctions on Iran. In exchange, the Iranian government would reduce its nuclear weapons program. By withdrawing from this treaty, Trump pushed Iran back into deprivation, as he restored cruel sanctions against the Iranian nation and its people. He also worsened the threat of nuclear weapons, as he allowed Iranian officials to resume the country's nuclear program at full throttle.

Early into his presidency, Trump also made another hideous choice regarding foreign policy. In April of 2017, he used chemical weapons against Syria, a strong ally of Russia. In doing this, he threatened war with both countries. In other words, because of Trump's actions, the US neared the abyss of war with Russia, which would have spelled disaster not only for the people of Russia and America but the world as a whole. Trump would also go on to veto a bill that would have ended American support for the Saudi Arabian government's genocide in Yemen.

Now, to be fair, Trump did have some important accomplishments that keep him from being lower. In 2018, for example, he helped reduce tensions between North and South Korea, though this only came to be following his extremely hawkish attitude toward Pyongyang. As a protectionist, I also like his tariffs. Finally, he deserves credit for establishing the Space Force. However, all of these are quite minor in comparison to the flaws of his presidency.

His response to the COVID-19 pandemic was absolutely horrendous. During the early months of the crisis, he dismissed the virus as a hoax. To be fair, he did eventually issue travel restrictions against China, where the illness was first identified. However, this decision was made far too late. Not only had COVID-19 already been spotted in the US, but by this point, countries aside from China had reported the virus within their borders. And yet, Trump didn't issue any travel restrictions against those countries; just China. Throughout the actual pandemic, he also issued practically no real measures to mitigate the virus. Instead, he let the states decide what to do. This transformed the US into a bizarre mashup of different reactions to one of the 21st century's worst crises yet, with responses ranging from lazy and neglectful to legitimately competent.

Like Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson, Trump was impeached. However, unlike Clinton and Johnson, he was impeached twice. And both times, he was impeached for some of the most wretched and gross abuses of presidential power in American history, with the first instance bordering on Watergate levels of severity, and the other far surpassing it.

Trump's first impeachment took place in the midst of the Ukraine Scandal. In essence, Trump, on July 24, 2019, called Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had become the president of Ukraine earlier that year, asking him to launch an investigation into the presence of Hunter Biden, the son of his opponent in the 2020 election Joe Biden, on the board of an oil company in the country. Trump wanted to obtain disparaging information about the Bidens from this investigation, which he could then use in the upcoming election. This is very much like Richard Nixon trying to suppress investigations into his reelection campaign trying to bug DNC phones in an attempt to find bad information about his opponents in the 1972 election during the Watergate Scandal.

Just before leaving office in 2021, Trump's second impeachment began. Like a petulant child, Trump refused to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election to Biden. He was even caught asking an election official in Georgia to conjure up enough votes for him to win that state in the Electoral College. But when Congress was about to certify his loss and Biden's victory, Trump urged his supporters to protest around the Capital Building, culminating in the riots of January 6, 2021. It was this incident that resulted in his second impeachment.

Originally, I was cautious about placing Trump in my bottom 5. I was worried that such an assessment would be rooted solely in recency bias. I always thought of Trump as a bad president, but I doubted his status as a president to be listed alongside Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan. However, upon re-analyzing his presidency, I realized that in reality, he truly was one of our worst. He withdrew from crucial agreements, nearly sparked a war with Russia, ignored a pandemic, encroached on civil liberties, banned immigration from numerous countries, and tried to inhibit our democracy on multiple occasions.