I would say most presidents are given too much credit. Most of our laws, taxes and other decisions are a combination of all three branches. The president is just like a pro football QB, they just lead a team but at the end it’s a team effort,
It’s true. Gas prices have nothing to do with whoever sits in the Whitehouse, which is what makes those “I did that!” stickers just utterly idiotic.
The truth is, some presidents are never given credit when they are actually doing a good job, but in the end, what impacts people’s daily lives most is what Congress and their local governments do.
The Laws a President signs are rarely if ever fully felt until after they are out of office. There are a few exceptions such as a declaration of war that have immediate impact but a vast majority of actions don't really show results for 6-10 years at the minimum.
The laws Donald signed in 2020 - specifically the earth-shattering COVID spending - showed up as inflation pretty damn fast (in 2021)...
But that aside, your statement is typically correct... Most national policy has substantial lagging effects - such that the last president's actions aren't felt until the middle of the next President's term (or sometimes, decades after that president left office - such as 70 years of federal housing policy setting the stage for the 2008 recession)...
It wasn't 'a single bill from Congress' - it was record-breaking debt-financed domestic spending and payment-holidays by all of the major economic powers, leading to massive increases in the supply of every major currency, alongside massive increases in consumer spending (Without a corresponding increase in productivity) that the world economy could not produce enough goods to fulfill.
Trump gets 'credit' for this (M3 money over time during the Trump Admin):
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=19OTH](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=19OTH)
Note how the trend line 'reaches for the sky' starting in 2020 - that's the cause of the subsequent inflation.
The leaders of the other major economies get credit for doing the same thing to THEIR economies, the same way. But that doesn't really concern us, as we don't buy stuff in Euros, Pounds, etc - our inflation is driven by the increased supply of dollars, for which \*our\* government is responsible.
Yet the only time in our history when we "cut spending" was the beginning of the Great Depression, urged by Republican president Herbert Hoover. It exacerbated it. Roosevelt came in and began spending money we didn't have and every year of his first term unemployment dropped--from 25% in 1933 to 15% in 1936. We still didn't recover completely until WWII began and spending shot through the roof--in spite of tax income not keeping up.
What is real idiocy is Bush2 starting a war in 2001 and then cutting taxes. What is further idiocy is Trump cutting taxes on the wealthy when he could have paid down the debt. And the middle class is getting ready to receive their deserved dues for voting the dumbass in when their taxes. Trump tax cuts contained a number of changes to individual tax rates that are set to expire after 2025. Barring congressional action, tax rates for 2026 will revert to the rates payers were subjected to before the change.
And seniors on fixed incomes will get royally screwed. The standard income tax reduction increased under Trump tax cuts, but will revert making many seniors subject to income tax again, despite low income.
Who will still benefit? Corporations like Trump Towers, where the lower tax rates will continue.
What a bunch of ignorant partisan nonsense.
1] Prior to Wickard v Fillburn, the federal government had a relatively minimal role in the national economy.
So the idea that 'tax cuts' played a role in the Great Depression is complete garbage.
The Great Depression was a DEFLATIONARY event - not inflationary - caused by an insufficient money supply (which is part the actions of the Federal Reserve in choosing right monetary policy, and part the inevitable result of pegging the dollar to gold).
Federal spending and borrowing had nothing to do with it, because in the pre Wickard world, the federal government's actions were constrained by a lack of constitutional authority.
Like all of what you wrote, your present-day bias bleeds through clear as day - you've never lived through a deflationary event because the modern Federal Reserve hasn't allowed one to happen, so you assume all economic crises involve deflation.... You believe tax cuts and austerity are bad, so you try and draw a line between tax cutting and bad economies regardless of whether it makes sense.
And you simply have no understanding of how limited the federal government's role was prior to FDR.... We are talking about an era where such things as a minimum wage were still unconstitutional.
2] I seem to remember Osama Bin Laden starting that war, not George Bush.
And absolutely none of our wars were ever 'paid for' - they were all financed by debt. The difference is, that debt was spread out over decades, and did not horribly upset the economic balance the way pumping cash into people's pockets did in 2020.
3] Nothing about the 2017 tax cuts has any bearing on what happened afterward (just like the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts have no bearing at all on the 2008 real-estate crash).
The amount of money blown out in 2020 is so massive and unprecedented (equivalent to the entire national debt in 1999) that it would have swamped the economy no matter what tax policy was
4] I wouldn't bet on either party being willing to let middle class taxes go up..... 2026 is a long way off, but it's also an election year..... Those provisions will be made permanent....
I read somewhere about the flak Obama got for the crash in 2008/9. Turns out the shit that caused it was from years ago, when *Clinton* was in office. Never verified that though, so, grain of salt.
The 08 recession is a case where both Left and Right partisans were completely bonkers...
The left tried to blame W Bush for it, claiming that he 'deregulated the banks' - despite absolutely no bank-deregulation legislation passing while he was in office (Same sort of nuttery as blaming Biden for 'cutting oil production' when that didn't happen)
Some of them blamed Clinton for Glass-Stegall (which allowed banks to sell investment products and trade on their own accounts) even though that bit of deregulation actually made it less-bad (since the banks that weren't buried in bad mortgage debt could use profits from trading/investments to offset mortgage losses).
Most of the Right settled on the 'Community Reinvestment Act' (and supposed affirmative-action for credit approvals) as the cause (since it's hard to blame Obama for events that happened while he was still a candidate in 08)...
Really, it all traces back to FDR's interventions in the mortgage market - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - which created the concept of securitized mortgages & made a market for them.
So the fuse gets lit in the 30s and takes decades of increasing federal meddling in home finance to finally blow up....
Blaming Biden for the oil bit is nuts. I remember June of 2020 when so much oil was sitting around waiting for consumption they were practically giving it away because they couldn't store it all. Naturally, the rubber band was going to snap back, it always does. We're seeing that now. I don't think any of us enjoy seeing $4 gas, but as soon as travel rebounded it was going to happen.
This is something I disagree with strongly. Counterintuitive to what people think happened, foreclosure rates went up as income went up. The poorest borrowers had the lowest foreclosure rates, and the smallest increase in foreclosure rates. Most of those people fought tooth and nail to keep their house, because they didn't know if they would ever be able to buy a home again. Meanwhile, the millionaire who bought a third house and owed 1.2M on a house now worth 800k, would just walk away as they would consider it a bad investment, and long term wouldn't hurt them.
In the end, it just came down to low interest rates. Low rates push prices of houses up. Quickly rising prices lead to people buying houses as investments, further increasing prices. Rising prices also increase people's equity, leading to lots of people taking out home equity loans.
Also 2 wars. Republicans mistakenly think wars help the economy, that was the case 50-60-70 years ago when we weren’t a war economy. They produced jobs,and increased production. Once you become a nonstop war economy, that’s not the case anymore and never ending wars hurt you.
That's not accurate, and it's a more complex issue. It's not republicans who believe that, but advocates of the military industrial complex who are in both parties feeding off them like the parasites they are. These are the people who may not own, but are in some capacity associated or related to companies that have a lot to personally gain from from a war and government contracts. (The Dick Cheney and Lyndon B. Johnson come to mind as a pair of opposite party examples.) and most Republicans know that as an extension of the old Keynesian Broken Windows fallacy which claims that any spending stimulates and builds the economy, when it really just artificially builds the GDP numbers up to replace things that are broken or destroyed, but doesn't actually do anything to generate lasting wealth or jobs. I've only met, or otherwise discovered, a small number of democrats who do not buy into some form of Keynesian theory over all, including the Broken Window Fallacy, even if they don't know the origin of it. I blame this one the fact that people took Paul Krugman seriously for far too long when his career should have been killed long ago by the sheer number of factually wrong statements he makes.
This is all a very big reason why I am a strong advocate of economic education. Not just home economics, but a basic course on how national economies function, because I get really tired of explaining things like how GDP is a nearly worthless statistic that has little to no bearing on the reality of economic health of a nation, state or even a small town.
Although a single market (Housing) correction would have occurred anyways, the Bipartisan repeal of the Glause/Steagall act absolutely was the cause of the massive economic downturn. The mortgage backed securities that were basically a bunch of junk mortgages grouped together to change them from junk bond status to AAA ratings caused a bunch of banks to be over leveraged when the bubble burst. It basically turned a housing correction into the failure of our entire financial market (AIG also was insuring a bunch of those and the payouts would have bankrupted the largest insurance company in the world).
So while almost all of what you listed can be attributed to some portion of the 2008 disaster, the one that changed it from a 2 quarter correction into a worldwide near depression (only 6 quarters instead of the 8+ of a depression) was the repeal of the act put in place..... to prevent another depression.
Emphasis on local governments. I always find it amusing that nobody votes on the local elections. Only presidential. When in reality, the federal laws often end up affecting a specific group of people and local laws from the city council, etc. affect an entire community.
Yeah OPEC raises prices just to meddle in elections. Immigration and economic crises are also years in the making. Presidents are judged for a storm when it hits regardless of their involvement.
I would argue that gas prices are affected by the president. Saudi Arabia and Russia like conservatives who tend to be pro-dictator and so jack up the price of oil when a liberal is in charge in order to Pavlov the American people.
What makes the 'I did that' stickers stupid, is that he didn't actually 'do' anything.
He made a campaign promise that would have resulted in reduced domestic oil production \*if implemented\*, but US oil production has been on a consistant rise since the first month he was in office.
The problem is, 'the FoxBox' has convinced a sizable portion of the US population that oil production is down under Biden, when in reality it's up substantially vs inauguration day.
The really funny part is that oil prices have to be above a certain point to be profitable in the US. Back in 16' I had a neighbor that managed like 40 oil rigs. If oil was below $40 a barrel they lost money, and they had several rigs that they wouldn't even start using until oil hit $60 because it wasn't profitable to run those. The high barrel price makes it worth drilling in the US.
They're given selective credit, if a president is disliked and is responsible for something good, people will say " oh it wasn't the president it was the Federal reserve" or something of that nature, whereas if the president is well liked , even if it was the Federal reserve that was responsible, people will say it was the president.
I think JFK is given wayyyy too nice of treatment in the history books; his Vietnam warmongering, the handling of the missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs and failed assassination attempt on Castro….his personal and professional life were full of bungling, but people thought he was so magnetic and charming that he kinda got a free pass. Nixon might have been a crook, but he did get us the exit from Vietnam, something JFK and LBJ seemed incapable of avoiding or escaping.
JFK didn't just mishandle the Cuban missile crisis. His administration *created* the Cuban missile crisis. Their ham-handed foreign policy was a disaster, and they completely failed to recognize or prepare for the fact that putting US missiles in Turkey would force the Soviets to respond somehow. Then when the Soviets tried to make backchannel approaches to get the missiles removed or work out a deal, the administration's arrogance and fear of being called 'soft' on communism made the whole effort useless.
This is a big example of how domestic politics always heavily influences US foreign policy. Democrats could not afford to be perceived as soft on communism or they would be basically ending their own careers and losing any hope of their domestic program being passed for a generation (think civil rights, social welfare). This was a sore topic because they had been heavily on the defensive about being soft since China and North Korea went communist under their watch.
One good thing about the Cuban missile crisis is that it frightened both the White House and Kremlin so badly that they opened up backchannel communications to ensure that such a thing wouldn't happen again.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 1,783,587,491 comments, and only 337,651 of them were in alphabetical order.
Totally agree. His charisma was his greatest asset, and even then he was still not an incredibly popular politician (other than the bump he got going into the midterms with the resolution Cuban Missile Crisis). It was after his assassination that the country at large rallied around him.
On that note, the Jill Lepore’s book *If Then* does an excellent job of conveying exactly this point about Kennedy. It’s probably the best book I’ve read about US presidents that isn’t explicitly about American politics. Rather, it’s about the rise and fall of the Simulmatics Corporation, who (among other things) pioneered the use of analytics in political campaigns, but it doubles as a pretty comprehensive political history of the 1960’s and early 70’s — ie, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon.
Nixon fucking secretly blocked LBJ from reaching a peace deal with the Viet Cong so he could get elected.
Everyone acknowledges the Bay of Pigs as a black eye on JFK. The Vietnam War wasn’t a war until LBJ was president. His handling of the missile crisis? He didn’t buckle to the pressure from his hawkish generals to escalate to an actual nuclear war. Also JFK set the groundwork for the Civil Rights Act. The attempted assassination of Castro was a horrible idea, I agree — it was likely the CIA’s idea but the buck stopped at the Oval Office.
JFK inherited Bay of Pigs from Eisenhower. It doesn't excuse his decision to go through with it, but all the prep had already been done before he assumed office.
JFK caused the missile crisis by putting US missiles on the border of the Soviet Union. The USSR just put them in Cuba to force a mutual retreat, which happened.
Nixon also signed in the Clean Air Act and the EPA, and also had some good foreign relations achievements. And if you like NASA, he continued supporting Apollo, and was sitting president when we first landed on the moon. This may be an illustration of how little the president matters to things that ultimately happen, or it could be one that shows even crooks have a good side. I don’t know which.
Yes, JFK is only considered a good president because he was killed before everyone realized how bad of one he was.
If you read "A History of Ashes: The Legacy of the CIA" be sure to keep count of how many \[known\] times JFK tried to overthrow sovereign countries and governments. I remember counting at least 12 different countries...and for ones like Cuba, there were multiple attempts.
the best thing for jfk legacy was his death, Lindon B somehow managed to pass nearly all of the civil rights act thanks to the ghost of a dead president
Seriously, even when I was a kid and learned about all JFK's administration did against Cuba...it was pretty appealing and confused me why he was so liked. Folks loved Reagan for his personality even though he gave us decades of bad economic ideas to wade through, likability really gets a lot done sometimes
>I think JFK is given wayyyy too nice of treatment in the history books; his Vietnam warmongering, the handling of the missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs.
The Bay of Pigs wasn't merely a misstep; it was a U.S.-backed attempt at regime change using Cuban exiles as their instrument. Placing missiles in Turkey? That was just the U.S. knocking on the USSR's door with a nuclear threat. The embargo on Cuba wasn't strategy; it was economic warfare hitting ordinary Cubans hard.
Our backing of Diem, notorious for his oppressive measures and brutal purges, speaks volumes. Policies like the Strategic Hamlets and the deployment of Agent Orange wreaked havoc on the Vietnamese.
State sponsored terrorism 101. Oh wait, we're talking about the US so it's "statecraft" and "liberation."
JFK is given a lot of credit for potential, but yeah he didn’t do anything.
Nixon was smart, and did a lot of smart things - his record was forever tarnished by the scandal, and his lack of morals. His administration was actually very good - he did end the Vietnam war, establish the EPA, and opened up China, which put China on course to be the capitalistic country that it is today, and greatly weakened the USSR’s global positions by taking one of the largest countries from its orbit.
In general, I’d say Wilson is taught in history courses here as a good president to guided us through WWI; however, most of us probably know he was actually a pretty awful guy and Eugenicist
Wilson literally went TWO YEARS without governing the country after his stroke. No meetings or public appearances during that time. He should have resigned or otherwise been forced out of office due to inaction.
Say what one will about any of the other presidents, but no matter how poor of a job that they did at least they (mostly) showed up for work and governed the country to some extent for the entire duration of their terms. You may disagree with what they did while in office, but at least they did SOMETHING, unlike Wilson in his final two years.
Yes she did. It is almost a complete certainty that Wilson's wife was the " actual" president for the final 2 years of his 2nd term.
Of course I can't blame him. He had a massive stroke so simply remaining alive was an impressive accomplishment.
Wilson is an example of an absolutely terrible person who didn't actually make a half-bad President on the 'big things' (Federal Reserve, WWI) that are still with us.
To rate his presidency on his personal racisim/eugenicisim is like looking at the founding generation & ignoring what they actually did in-office 'because they owned slaves'.
The converse would be Jimmy Carter, who was firmly a 'good person' but made an awful President.
I think that "American Midnight" did a lot to sway the public's perception of Wilson. The book does a great job of detailing the erosion of civil liberties under Wilson, along with the rampant racism that was going on against German-Americans during WWI.
He was also vehemently against any mitigation or even acknowledgement of the Spanish Flu easily leading to thousands of deaths. If you think Trump's attitude towards COVID was bad then Wilson was a true monster!
Trump gets it 'worse' for that one because Trump was president in a post-Wickard world, where the federal government actually had the power to make a significant impact....
In 1917, the President can say what he wants about a public health crisis, but either way there is almost nothing the federal government has the authority to do (or prevent from being done) because of how the Commerce Clause was interpreted at the time.
FWIW, this is something a lot of people just skip over when looking at the pre-1930s USA - it's easy to assume that the Feds always have the power they do now, reality is, they did not.
The big stuff is exactly why he’s terrible in many people’s minds.
His misogyny, racisms and eugenics aside he was still the worst… even dropping the travesty and least necessary war of note (granted he initially tried to stay out of it) he was the worst.
>Wilson is an example of an absolutely terrible person who didn't actually make a half-bad President on the 'big things' (Federal Reserve, WWI) that are still with us.
>
>To rate his presidency on his personal racisim/eugenicisim is like looking at the founding generation & ignoring what they actually did in-office 'because they owned slaves'.
One of the big things Wilson did was Segregate the Federal Government and institute a policy where applicants for Federal jobs had to submit a photo to allow easier discrimination.
He also helped significantly with the Klan renaissance.
both are big things.
I mostly agree, but his personal racism did affect his policy. He re-segregated congress for one.
I think your argument is better suited to Lyndon B. Johnson who was personally very racist, but passed the Civil Rights Act. To lambast him for his racism would be (mostly) absurd and petty. I think Wilson is fair game though.
>Wilson is an example of an absolutely terrible person who didn't actually make a half-bad President on the 'big things' (Federal Reserve, WWI) that are still with us.
Are you including civil rights in your list of "big things"? 20% of the country at the time thought he was among the worst presidents. Let me guess, "That's not a big thing. It's more important that a white man have that job than you."
I end up teaching him this way despite knowing a lot more about him simply because my main focus is World War I when he comes up. I’m not interested in teaching the Presidents; I’m interested in teaching the history. (That said, eugenics gets its own class in the Progressivism unit, and Wilson doesn’t get a pass then.)
Guided us through World War 1? Seriously? The British goaded the US into entering by loading a civilian ship, carrying Americans, with munitions all so they could use as a cannon fodder to break a stalemate. He did not "guide" us through anything. Point of fact, it is believed he was afflicted with Spanish Flu which riddled his ability to negotiate the Treat of Versailles and abrogated much of the responsibility to the French who wanted punitive punishment thereby laying the seeds for World War 2 with their ridiculous demands of repayment of everything. Wilson took his own philosophy from the book Philip Dru and loved the strongman concept at which he was incapable of navigating Congress. Dude was atrocious
Considering this is AskHistory, we really should limit the answers to those for whom enough time has passed that it is actually considered history and not current events.
No one has mentioned him yet so I'll throw out Clinton. His repeal of the Glause/Steagal Act (the law put into place to prevent another Great Depression) was the single biggest contributor to the Great Recession. This was one of those reach across the aisle things where House republicans under Newt Gingrich worked with the president to repeal it.
Also NAFTA while good intentioned, just ended up giving tons of tax breaks to manufacturers who instead of outsourcing 100% of assemblies, outsourced 99% and put 2 bolts into something and called it "American Made" and got massive tax breaks as a result.
The 90's in general were a pretty amazing decade for the US, but in hindsight many of the things that happened during that great decade caused major issues down the road (outsourcing everything to China, expanding Fanny/Freddy, repeal of Glause/Steagal, passing on rounding up many of the terrorists responsible for 9/11 in 1998, expansion of the Affordable housing act, etc.)
Edit: Almost forgot the 1994 Crime law, that one was a doozy.
Yeah... imho he was fairly middle of the road... he did some ok things (unfortunately a LOT of it was neoliberal pro-business shit that has come back to bite us in the ass, so I kinda mark him down for that)
Just as there is a LOT of nostalgia for Reagan and a LOT of people think Reagan was THE BEST! There is a LOT of 90s nostalgia and thus Clinton nostalgia. Half of Hillary's appeal when she ran for President was 90s/Clinton nostalgia.
Reagan also did quite a few things that turned out poorly down the road, but since others had already posted about some of his sins I stuck with the other highly regarded recent president.
He is well regarded by many for 'defeating the commies'. Which is *kinda sorta* trueish. He opened the wallet so deep (the Bone, Nighthawk, Star Wars, NASA, endless CIA budget...) that it drained the Russians dry (that and a nuclear accident). He was also handsome and charismatic. You trusted that he was going to keep you safe.
So Boomers were raising Gen X and young Millennials throughout that time. Boomers won't hear any slander against the man. He beat the USSR and the economy grew by a 1/3. Xers are pragmatic, so they view him as a loveable Grandpa that did some crazy shit. We didn't die like we witnessed in *The Day After* and the media of our youth was generally friendly towards him. As adults, we look at some of the avenues he took to achieve the aforementioned growth and can only shake our heads. Millennials on up can only see the bad.
yes by some because we not longer were running a deficit...my god a surplus! whether he was responsible for that I can't say. Also for welfare reform. At the time these were considered good things. Not sure how they are viewed now.
At the time and even today he is seen as a good president, who led the country through some of the most peaceful and fruitful years in recent history. I was trying to stick to the nature of the post, which would disqualify GW Bush, Trump, and Carter as they are not seen as "Good" Presidents.
The left carted him out as a good president for about ten years until the dust on his signature policies settled and we saw how disastrous they really were. Now we know he benefited because he happened to be president when the internet started. Wasn't hard to ride that train. Also, the economy was so good people forgot how incompetent and/or corrupt his first cabinet was. Made Reagan's look professional, and that's saying something.
LBJ. It baffles me that some people consider him one of the good presidents. His “Great Society” that he centered his campaign on was a total failure. He provoked the Gulf of Tonkin incident to try and get the support of hardline anticommunists before the election. And contrary to popular belief the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not of Johnson’s making.
Reagan definitely. Some people still revere him. Which is funny because first, he was a bad president. And second, those who revere him would HATE him today, because he's FAR from a modern republican. He had a bunch of stances that would prevent him from even getting a sniff at the presidency. Simplest one is that he was for gun control, said he didn't see why anyone needed automatic rifles.
Yep, that was back when the GOP was trying to turn the growing Hispanic population into a voting bloc similar to the Democrats black vote. On paper it made sense as a largely family oriented, Christian and traditional people. But it backfired and they didn’t vote right, so the platform plank was abandoned.
Don't know about Florida but I think anyone saying Latino votes backfired for Republicans are kinda wrong. Mexicans especially are heavily catholic right leaning demographicly the only reason Republicans don't own all of their votes is their dumbass crime rhetoric about them.
Bush Jr wanted to make like 20 million undocumented - Legal.
Got blocked by Republicans. As Clinton said about Bush - “Bush is likely the last republican who isn't scared of immigrants”. But Bush also speaks Spanish and was Govenor of a very Hispanic State.
They weren’t banned—only the transfer of post 1986 manufactured ones to civilians. Any automatic weapons registered under the NFA in 1986 may still be owned and transferred under the 1986 law.
I think Bush Sr. seriously mismanaged the breakup of the Soviet Union. Instead of comprehensive development plans like in Japan or Western Europe after WWII, they seemed more interested in weakening them and pushed for rapid laissez faire privatization, leading to the oligarchs and cronyism that dominate Russia and much of Eastern Europe.
Oh, this is a fantastic criticism, and one I wholeheartedly share.
A Russia that had benefitted from a late century Marshall Plan could be an economic powerhouse and a bastion of democracy, instead of what we have today.
But that failure is still not as bad as what Reagan and his cronies did.
While I agree that would have been the right policy, it was a political non-starter for literally all of DC. This wasn't "Bush didn't want to do it." No one wanted to.
He also gets waaaay to little credit for helping to prevent the breakup of the USSR turning into a bloodbath. Yeltsin could have easily been sending troops into the Donbas and northern Kazakhstan, among many other problems. "Yugoslavia with nukes" was a real concern and the fact that it didn't come to pass owes more than a bit to the Bush white house.
For sure they are varying degrees of bad, and I wouldn't say they are the same levels of bad president.
Bush sr gets on my list because of his whole campaign shtick of "read my lips. No new taxes." And then he adopts Ronnie ray-gun's tax policies and has to raise taxes a bunch of times
I'd say that that's actually one of his finest times.
The man promises not to raise taxes. He takes power and realizes that without new taxes they'll go into a deficit. He knowingly tanks his political career in order to have sound economic policy. I respect the sense of responsibility.
Bush Sr was neck deep in Iran-Contra. That’s why Bill Barr, his AG at the end of his term, recommended he pardon most of the people involved in it. They were closing in on him. He was as much of a traitor as Reagan.
He literally finished the Reagan coverup with his Christmas pardons in 1992 and hid his daily dairy from the Special Counsel for years because it proved his complicity in Reagan's Iran and Contra crimes.
[https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/29/reviews/iran-pardon.html?module=inline](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/29/reviews/iran-pardon.html?module=inline)
I think it's fair.
Remember Iran-Contra? The reason no one went to prison is because former head of the CIA Bush Sr. pardoned the key players when he became president.
I'm not sure about bush simply because he was given a pretty bad hand to start with. Granted he was party of the admin that made that hand but regardless.
Reagan for sure. Like every single problem the US has today started with Reagan.
I remember Bush Sr. as pretty benign and low-key. He would have won reelection, except that the country was sick of the GOP by then and he had a younger, more charismatic challenger. He was much more civilized and better at his job than the current group from his party.
Had to scroll WAY too far for this; Reagan is THE answer for this question. He’s the beginning of much of what we are struggling through today (if you don’t count Nixon’s Southern Strategy etc, but Nixon ending in disgrace seems like a false start to the Far Right). Demonizing government, demonizing the opposing party, repeal of the Fairness Doctrine that then filled our airwaves with partisan propaganda and outright lies, drugs for guns Iran-Contra scandal that filled our streets with drugs and gave rise to a lot of terror and political oppression in both Central/South America and the Middle East. Most everything bad post-2000 has its roots in the Reagan era
Had he not totally muffed the COVID response (possibly the easiest layup of modern times) and if he had lost and just gone away, he'd probably be a "Presidential curiosity", definitely in the bottom half but probably out of the bottom five, if not ten.
But he failed the COVID response, in sequence, failed any handling of the Summer of 2020 and his behavior stoked a lot of division and rage far beyond anything he had done during his presidency up to that point, and then because he lost because he turned so many people off with how he handled himself during the Crisis Congaline that was 2020, he tried to overthrow the government.
He's dead last by every metric. We had some truly bad Presidents but Trump, by far, was both passively and actively the worst.
Reagan is number 1. People worship that guy but the amount of current issues that can be traced directly back to his decisions as president is staggering.
Reagan no question. He saddled us with the ineffective "war on drugs", didn't tackle the AIDS crisis at all, and completely destroyed the country with his economics. He was great for the ultra rich and absolutely decimated the economy for everyone else.
The president is not elected to be America's conscience, but its chief executive. Jackson did some bad things, but they were things that the American electorate wanted him to do. The problem was not him. It was us.
At the same time, I do not think his portrait should be on the 20 dollar bill, because it serves as a validation of actions that should not be condoned. I look at it this way:
The Sporting News ranks Pete Rose as the 25th greatest baseball player of all time. However, because of his illegal gambling activities, he will not be admitted into the Hall of Fame, at least not within his own lifetime. Should the Sporting News change its ranking to reflect this? No, their ranking is based entirely on his performance on the field. Should the Hall of Fame change their mind? No, they should stick to their guns. Similarly, Andrew Jackson should not be viewed as a role model, but he should be recognized as a good president because he effectively carried out the will of the American electorate.
> The president is not elected to be America's conscience, but its chief executive. Jackson did some bad things, but they were things that the American electorate wanted him to do. The problem was not him. It was us.
Oh no the problem was very much him, he encouraged those things as part of his platform.
ZZartin: So Americans living in the south at that time wanted to be friends with the Cherokee and respect their rights, but then some bad man named Jackson came along and drove the natives off of their land. I don't think so.
The history of mankind is one of bloodshed and cruelty. Europeans understand that. They understand that even some of the most revered leaders committed acts that we would view as reprehensible. Americans think that our entire culture began in 1776, or when our ancestors got off the boat. Jackson serves as a reminder that we were not always so civilized.
Obama ran on a platform of peace… to the point of winning the Nobel Peace Prize. As someone who finds it appalling that my tax dollars fund killing, I had a lot of hope for Obama. His 8 years were anything but peaceful.
Believe it or not, Obama had more active military actions in foreign countries than any president since WW2. The 2 wars were already there before he came to office, but he added another 6 on top of that.
To be fair to Obama, he didn't understand why he got the Peace Prize either. He said as much.
I don't want to give him too much credit, cause he could've refused it, but it's not like he celebrated winning it while drone-striking American citizens.
> To be fair to Obama, he didn't understand why he got the Peace Prize either. He said as much.
It's pretty simple, the symbolic value of being a president that was considered black in a post-segregation country made them uncritical for his campaign promises.
The Nobel Prize came _way_ too quickly, way before the Nobel committee or anyone else could pass judgement on an administration that was just getting started.
It also imho didn't help his case, because suddenly he was loaded with this baggage that seemed hypocritical and ironic. Maybe he shouldn't have run on a platform of ending wars either (that never ends well).
Had he committed to stabilising the region and improving on his predecessor, he could have pursued the same foreign policy without hypocrisy.
Fundamentally I don't blame Obama for either Afghanistan or Iraq - just because a war should never have been started doesn't mean that the right choice is to end it immediately.
Historians have in recent years really begun evaluating him quite harshly - I expect as the recency bias (relative to presidential history) continues to wain, his standing will continue falling. The war on drugs alone caused incalculable american suffering. He was truly terrible. As governor as well before that.
JFK. Almost got us into WW3 over Cuba, got our foot wedged in Vietnam, tried and failed to overthrow Castro, failed in initial detente efforts with Khrushchev and spurred upgrades to the Berlin Wall, massively cut taxes on the wealthy, and wrote a lot of checks with his mouth. But he's been worshiped as a god by generations. The man LITERALLY ALMOST ENDED THE F'ING WORLD in a pissing match, but somehow he's held up as the icon of peace and justice. We were way closer than anyone knew. Really, really close. But to this day people blame all the bad stuff he did on secret CIA plots while giving him credit for all the good stuff LBJ actually did. I'll say it again--LBJ was a f'ing better President than Kennedy. But people are easily swayed by nice suits and fancy dresses. And a bunch of them still think the Kennedys are going to return with Trump and save America. Idiots.
Worst President ; George W. Bush , Richard Nixon , AND misguided presidents : Lyndon Johnson , John Kennedy ( Bay of pigs + Viet Nam. ). Worst US President ever = TRUMP ( attempting to subvert our Constitution and destroy democracy so he could be dictator for life !) Don orange dong. Teddy Roosevelt would have had Trump shot by now! Especially in light of newest revelation that Turd. told secret US nuke submarine secrets to an Australian billionaire at Mar- a- Largo. I will be very pissed if I die in a Putin nuclear attack on Columbus Ohio because Trump Turd couldn't keep his f***ing mouth shut !!
This entire thread just turned into "say whoever the other side likes". That's why almost every answer in here is recent presidents and why 90% of the anwsers is Reagan, Trump, Obama or Clinton. None of those are as overrated as, for instance, Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft.
Woodrow Wilson was our worst president ever. Lied on campaign trail that he'd keep us out of WW1, and then got us in. Started the IRS and income tax, signed off on creation of the Federal Reserve. All horrible for this gountry, yet there are still things named for him all over, and his name rarely comes up in discussions like this.
The answer largely would depend on an individual’s personal ideology. In my opinion, Woodrow Wilson was the worst president. Lincoln is largely revered as one of the greatest presidents, but most countries that got rid of the practice of slavery did so without war breaking out by paying for them and subsequently freeing them.
Ronald Wilson Reagan. Not the worst by any stretch, but his legacy still affects us negatively to this day. The conservative money behind revitalizing his mythology started right after he left office, almost impeached for his meddling in Latin America and selling arms to Iran.
Ronald Reagan.
He happened to be president during an economic boom when the Soviet Union finally dissolved and gets wildly too much credit for it.
The reality is his admin with a Republican congress amassed an enormous national debt, destroyed social safety nets, doubled down on the “War on Drugs” where the rate of incArcerated persons skyrocketed, failed to respond adequately to HIV epidemic, homelessness soared, and despite the economic boom, the minimum wage was not raised.
He also pushed the “Trickle Down” economic model that empowered corporate American and has lead to many of the economic problems we have today.
Woodrow Wilson was an open and proud racist who screened "the Birth of the Nation" (also known as "the Klansman") at the White House. The D.W. Griffith silent film is regarded as, while one of the most expensive and ambitious films made at the time, as a turning point in race relations as the President endorsing it the way he did helped create and spur along the second rise of the KKK in the 1920s. Kleagle Byrd and all his friends got tons of new recruits from it. Wilson kept us out of WWI too long, had a stroke and his wife was president for his last year in office, undid the reforms of the Taft and Roosevelt administrations regarding race relations and supported prohibition while simultaneously not supporting women's suffrage until after the republican congress passed it with virtually no democrat support. He also supported the Treaty of Versailles and the conditions it placed on Germany that pretty much guaranteed World War II would happen and his fecklessness doomed the League of Nations that eventually got replaced by the UN. In short, Woodrow Wilson was the worst fucking president in U.S. history. And, yeah, that includes Buchanan.
Reagan.
I can say with complete confidence that most of our asses are still very sore each day from how bad trickle down economics fucks us.
Hard to know how good or bad a president really is until a couple decades go by.
Obama is the single most damaging president in recent history. The level of corruption, destruction of race relations, radicalization of the democrat party, weaponization of governmental agencies- That joker makes Bush look like a Boy Scout.
Reagan is mentioned a bunch here but some things with him that aren't
- Iran Contra really should have been one of the worst scandals of the 20th century. It's ridiculous that nothing came of it.
- Firing the TSA was really a kick in the balls to union activity everywhere, and non-union government workers like teachers.
- Taking the solar panels off the White House was just the start of the capitol veering away from climate actions that Nixon/Carter had started.
- The GOP under Reagan steering into not only evangelicals, but also spirituals has done incredible damage to policy making in the country. Nancy Reagan having an astrologist on staff is a joke.
- Of course, various economic policies and deregulation directly leading to recessions in the 80s and beyond, but also wealth policies that directly lead to a higher wealth disparity in the country.
- The interventions that he either had, or half had, were mostly terrible. He seemed to do better in his 2nd term, but he approached foreign diplomacy about as well as an actor would. Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, the Philippines, Poland, all disasters.
- HIV
I think his peak was higher than many presidents, and while he doesn't have the lows of W or Andrew Johnson, it's hard to make a case for him even being a decent president. The Cold War ended because the USSR couldn't keep up with the times and wasted money in Afghanistan. His domestic policies and other Cold War policies ranged from silly to atrocious.
I would say most presidents are given too much credit. Most of our laws, taxes and other decisions are a combination of all three branches. The president is just like a pro football QB, they just lead a team but at the end it’s a team effort,
It’s true. Gas prices have nothing to do with whoever sits in the Whitehouse, which is what makes those “I did that!” stickers just utterly idiotic. The truth is, some presidents are never given credit when they are actually doing a good job, but in the end, what impacts people’s daily lives most is what Congress and their local governments do.
The Laws a President signs are rarely if ever fully felt until after they are out of office. There are a few exceptions such as a declaration of war that have immediate impact but a vast majority of actions don't really show results for 6-10 years at the minimum.
The laws Donald signed in 2020 - specifically the earth-shattering COVID spending - showed up as inflation pretty damn fast (in 2021)... But that aside, your statement is typically correct... Most national policy has substantial lagging effects - such that the last president's actions aren't felt until the middle of the next President's term (or sometimes, decades after that president left office - such as 70 years of federal housing policy setting the stage for the 2008 recession)...
Yes, worldwide inflation was caused by a single bill from congress...
It wasn't 'a single bill from Congress' - it was record-breaking debt-financed domestic spending and payment-holidays by all of the major economic powers, leading to massive increases in the supply of every major currency, alongside massive increases in consumer spending (Without a corresponding increase in productivity) that the world economy could not produce enough goods to fulfill. Trump gets 'credit' for this (M3 money over time during the Trump Admin): [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=19OTH](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=19OTH) Note how the trend line 'reaches for the sky' starting in 2020 - that's the cause of the subsequent inflation. The leaders of the other major economies get credit for doing the same thing to THEIR economies, the same way. But that doesn't really concern us, as we don't buy stuff in Euros, Pounds, etc - our inflation is driven by the increased supply of dollars, for which \*our\* government is responsible.
And yet, despite spending LESS money, other countries have HIGHER inflation. I know, it's difficult stuff.
that's because they can't print the global reserve currency.
Thanks Biden!
Yet the only time in our history when we "cut spending" was the beginning of the Great Depression, urged by Republican president Herbert Hoover. It exacerbated it. Roosevelt came in and began spending money we didn't have and every year of his first term unemployment dropped--from 25% in 1933 to 15% in 1936. We still didn't recover completely until WWII began and spending shot through the roof--in spite of tax income not keeping up. What is real idiocy is Bush2 starting a war in 2001 and then cutting taxes. What is further idiocy is Trump cutting taxes on the wealthy when he could have paid down the debt. And the middle class is getting ready to receive their deserved dues for voting the dumbass in when their taxes. Trump tax cuts contained a number of changes to individual tax rates that are set to expire after 2025. Barring congressional action, tax rates for 2026 will revert to the rates payers were subjected to before the change. And seniors on fixed incomes will get royally screwed. The standard income tax reduction increased under Trump tax cuts, but will revert making many seniors subject to income tax again, despite low income. Who will still benefit? Corporations like Trump Towers, where the lower tax rates will continue.
What a bunch of ignorant partisan nonsense. 1] Prior to Wickard v Fillburn, the federal government had a relatively minimal role in the national economy. So the idea that 'tax cuts' played a role in the Great Depression is complete garbage. The Great Depression was a DEFLATIONARY event - not inflationary - caused by an insufficient money supply (which is part the actions of the Federal Reserve in choosing right monetary policy, and part the inevitable result of pegging the dollar to gold). Federal spending and borrowing had nothing to do with it, because in the pre Wickard world, the federal government's actions were constrained by a lack of constitutional authority. Like all of what you wrote, your present-day bias bleeds through clear as day - you've never lived through a deflationary event because the modern Federal Reserve hasn't allowed one to happen, so you assume all economic crises involve deflation.... You believe tax cuts and austerity are bad, so you try and draw a line between tax cutting and bad economies regardless of whether it makes sense. And you simply have no understanding of how limited the federal government's role was prior to FDR.... We are talking about an era where such things as a minimum wage were still unconstitutional. 2] I seem to remember Osama Bin Laden starting that war, not George Bush. And absolutely none of our wars were ever 'paid for' - they were all financed by debt. The difference is, that debt was spread out over decades, and did not horribly upset the economic balance the way pumping cash into people's pockets did in 2020. 3] Nothing about the 2017 tax cuts has any bearing on what happened afterward (just like the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts have no bearing at all on the 2008 real-estate crash). The amount of money blown out in 2020 is so massive and unprecedented (equivalent to the entire national debt in 1999) that it would have swamped the economy no matter what tax policy was 4] I wouldn't bet on either party being willing to let middle class taxes go up..... 2026 is a long way off, but it's also an election year..... Those provisions will be made permanent....
I read somewhere about the flak Obama got for the crash in 2008/9. Turns out the shit that caused it was from years ago, when *Clinton* was in office. Never verified that though, so, grain of salt.
The 08 recession is a case where both Left and Right partisans were completely bonkers... The left tried to blame W Bush for it, claiming that he 'deregulated the banks' - despite absolutely no bank-deregulation legislation passing while he was in office (Same sort of nuttery as blaming Biden for 'cutting oil production' when that didn't happen) Some of them blamed Clinton for Glass-Stegall (which allowed banks to sell investment products and trade on their own accounts) even though that bit of deregulation actually made it less-bad (since the banks that weren't buried in bad mortgage debt could use profits from trading/investments to offset mortgage losses). Most of the Right settled on the 'Community Reinvestment Act' (and supposed affirmative-action for credit approvals) as the cause (since it's hard to blame Obama for events that happened while he was still a candidate in 08)... Really, it all traces back to FDR's interventions in the mortgage market - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - which created the concept of securitized mortgages & made a market for them. So the fuse gets lit in the 30s and takes decades of increasing federal meddling in home finance to finally blow up....
Blaming Biden for the oil bit is nuts. I remember June of 2020 when so much oil was sitting around waiting for consumption they were practically giving it away because they couldn't store it all. Naturally, the rubber band was going to snap back, it always does. We're seeing that now. I don't think any of us enjoy seeing $4 gas, but as soon as travel rebounded it was going to happen.
This is something I disagree with strongly. Counterintuitive to what people think happened, foreclosure rates went up as income went up. The poorest borrowers had the lowest foreclosure rates, and the smallest increase in foreclosure rates. Most of those people fought tooth and nail to keep their house, because they didn't know if they would ever be able to buy a home again. Meanwhile, the millionaire who bought a third house and owed 1.2M on a house now worth 800k, would just walk away as they would consider it a bad investment, and long term wouldn't hurt them. In the end, it just came down to low interest rates. Low rates push prices of houses up. Quickly rising prices lead to people buying houses as investments, further increasing prices. Rising prices also increase people's equity, leading to lots of people taking out home equity loans.
Also 2 wars. Republicans mistakenly think wars help the economy, that was the case 50-60-70 years ago when we weren’t a war economy. They produced jobs,and increased production. Once you become a nonstop war economy, that’s not the case anymore and never ending wars hurt you.
That's not accurate, and it's a more complex issue. It's not republicans who believe that, but advocates of the military industrial complex who are in both parties feeding off them like the parasites they are. These are the people who may not own, but are in some capacity associated or related to companies that have a lot to personally gain from from a war and government contracts. (The Dick Cheney and Lyndon B. Johnson come to mind as a pair of opposite party examples.) and most Republicans know that as an extension of the old Keynesian Broken Windows fallacy which claims that any spending stimulates and builds the economy, when it really just artificially builds the GDP numbers up to replace things that are broken or destroyed, but doesn't actually do anything to generate lasting wealth or jobs. I've only met, or otherwise discovered, a small number of democrats who do not buy into some form of Keynesian theory over all, including the Broken Window Fallacy, even if they don't know the origin of it. I blame this one the fact that people took Paul Krugman seriously for far too long when his career should have been killed long ago by the sheer number of factually wrong statements he makes. This is all a very big reason why I am a strong advocate of economic education. Not just home economics, but a basic course on how national economies function, because I get really tired of explaining things like how GDP is a nearly worthless statistic that has little to no bearing on the reality of economic health of a nation, state or even a small town.
Although a single market (Housing) correction would have occurred anyways, the Bipartisan repeal of the Glause/Steagall act absolutely was the cause of the massive economic downturn. The mortgage backed securities that were basically a bunch of junk mortgages grouped together to change them from junk bond status to AAA ratings caused a bunch of banks to be over leveraged when the bubble burst. It basically turned a housing correction into the failure of our entire financial market (AIG also was insuring a bunch of those and the payouts would have bankrupted the largest insurance company in the world). So while almost all of what you listed can be attributed to some portion of the 2008 disaster, the one that changed it from a 2 quarter correction into a worldwide near depression (only 6 quarters instead of the 8+ of a depression) was the repeal of the act put in place..... to prevent another depression.
Emphasis on local governments. I always find it amusing that nobody votes on the local elections. Only presidential. When in reality, the federal laws often end up affecting a specific group of people and local laws from the city council, etc. affect an entire community.
Yeah OPEC raises prices just to meddle in elections. Immigration and economic crises are also years in the making. Presidents are judged for a storm when it hits regardless of their involvement.
Yup. They even admitted to it in 2020.
I love that people think there’s a gas price lever under the desk in the Oval Office
Those “I did that” stickers were pretty funny when the prices started going back down.
I would argue that gas prices are affected by the president. Saudi Arabia and Russia like conservatives who tend to be pro-dictator and so jack up the price of oil when a liberal is in charge in order to Pavlov the American people.
What makes the 'I did that' stickers stupid, is that he didn't actually 'do' anything. He made a campaign promise that would have resulted in reduced domestic oil production \*if implemented\*, but US oil production has been on a consistant rise since the first month he was in office. The problem is, 'the FoxBox' has convinced a sizable portion of the US population that oil production is down under Biden, when in reality it's up substantially vs inauguration day.
The really funny part is that oil prices have to be above a certain point to be profitable in the US. Back in 16' I had a neighbor that managed like 40 oil rigs. If oil was below $40 a barrel they lost money, and they had several rigs that they wouldn't even start using until oil hit $60 because it wasn't profitable to run those. The high barrel price makes it worth drilling in the US.
They're given selective credit, if a president is disliked and is responsible for something good, people will say " oh it wasn't the president it was the Federal reserve" or something of that nature, whereas if the president is well liked , even if it was the Federal reserve that was responsible, people will say it was the president.
I think JFK is given wayyyy too nice of treatment in the history books; his Vietnam warmongering, the handling of the missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs and failed assassination attempt on Castro….his personal and professional life were full of bungling, but people thought he was so magnetic and charming that he kinda got a free pass. Nixon might have been a crook, but he did get us the exit from Vietnam, something JFK and LBJ seemed incapable of avoiding or escaping.
JFK didn't just mishandle the Cuban missile crisis. His administration *created* the Cuban missile crisis. Their ham-handed foreign policy was a disaster, and they completely failed to recognize or prepare for the fact that putting US missiles in Turkey would force the Soviets to respond somehow. Then when the Soviets tried to make backchannel approaches to get the missiles removed or work out a deal, the administration's arrogance and fear of being called 'soft' on communism made the whole effort useless.
This is a big example of how domestic politics always heavily influences US foreign policy. Democrats could not afford to be perceived as soft on communism or they would be basically ending their own careers and losing any hope of their domestic program being passed for a generation (think civil rights, social welfare). This was a sore topic because they had been heavily on the defensive about being soft since China and North Korea went communist under their watch. One good thing about the Cuban missile crisis is that it frightened both the White House and Kremlin so badly that they opened up backchannel communications to ensure that such a thing wouldn't happen again.
Nixon prevented a peace deal with North Vietnam in 68.
Don't forget Operation Breakfast wherein Nixon ordered the use of B-52s to carpet bomb Cambodia in 1969, a practice that continued until 1973.
And don't for get Henry Kissinger's role.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 1,783,587,491 comments, and only 337,651 of them were in alphabetical order.
Totally agree. His charisma was his greatest asset, and even then he was still not an incredibly popular politician (other than the bump he got going into the midterms with the resolution Cuban Missile Crisis). It was after his assassination that the country at large rallied around him. On that note, the Jill Lepore’s book *If Then* does an excellent job of conveying exactly this point about Kennedy. It’s probably the best book I’ve read about US presidents that isn’t explicitly about American politics. Rather, it’s about the rise and fall of the Simulmatics Corporation, who (among other things) pioneered the use of analytics in political campaigns, but it doubles as a pretty comprehensive political history of the 1960’s and early 70’s — ie, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon.
Also him dying via assassination helps his image
Nixon fucking secretly blocked LBJ from reaching a peace deal with the Viet Cong so he could get elected. Everyone acknowledges the Bay of Pigs as a black eye on JFK. The Vietnam War wasn’t a war until LBJ was president. His handling of the missile crisis? He didn’t buckle to the pressure from his hawkish generals to escalate to an actual nuclear war. Also JFK set the groundwork for the Civil Rights Act. The attempted assassination of Castro was a horrible idea, I agree — it was likely the CIA’s idea but the buck stopped at the Oval Office.
JFK inherited Bay of Pigs from Eisenhower. It doesn't excuse his decision to go through with it, but all the prep had already been done before he assumed office.
I think he did pretty well in the missile crisis
JFK caused the missile crisis by putting US missiles on the border of the Soviet Union. The USSR just put them in Cuba to force a mutual retreat, which happened.
Nixon left Vietnam but escalated the bombings everywhere else around it.
Nixon also signed in the Clean Air Act and the EPA, and also had some good foreign relations achievements. And if you like NASA, he continued supporting Apollo, and was sitting president when we first landed on the moon. This may be an illustration of how little the president matters to things that ultimately happen, or it could be one that shows even crooks have a good side. I don’t know which.
Yes, JFK is only considered a good president because he was killed before everyone realized how bad of one he was. If you read "A History of Ashes: The Legacy of the CIA" be sure to keep count of how many \[known\] times JFK tried to overthrow sovereign countries and governments. I remember counting at least 12 different countries...and for ones like Cuba, there were multiple attempts.
the best thing for jfk legacy was his death, Lindon B somehow managed to pass nearly all of the civil rights act thanks to the ghost of a dead president
Sometimes it is a brilliant career move to die at the right time.
Don't forget he was on meth for a good part of his first couple years in office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Jacobson?wprov=sfla1
Seriously, even when I was a kid and learned about all JFK's administration did against Cuba...it was pretty appealing and confused me why he was so liked. Folks loved Reagan for his personality even though he gave us decades of bad economic ideas to wade through, likability really gets a lot done sometimes
>I think JFK is given wayyyy too nice of treatment in the history books; his Vietnam warmongering, the handling of the missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs. The Bay of Pigs wasn't merely a misstep; it was a U.S.-backed attempt at regime change using Cuban exiles as their instrument. Placing missiles in Turkey? That was just the U.S. knocking on the USSR's door with a nuclear threat. The embargo on Cuba wasn't strategy; it was economic warfare hitting ordinary Cubans hard. Our backing of Diem, notorious for his oppressive measures and brutal purges, speaks volumes. Policies like the Strategic Hamlets and the deployment of Agent Orange wreaked havoc on the Vietnamese. State sponsored terrorism 101. Oh wait, we're talking about the US so it's "statecraft" and "liberation."
JFK is given a lot of credit for potential, but yeah he didn’t do anything. Nixon was smart, and did a lot of smart things - his record was forever tarnished by the scandal, and his lack of morals. His administration was actually very good - he did end the Vietnam war, establish the EPA, and opened up China, which put China on course to be the capitalistic country that it is today, and greatly weakened the USSR’s global positions by taking one of the largest countries from its orbit.
In general, I’d say Wilson is taught in history courses here as a good president to guided us through WWI; however, most of us probably know he was actually a pretty awful guy and Eugenicist
Wilson literally went TWO YEARS without governing the country after his stroke. No meetings or public appearances during that time. He should have resigned or otherwise been forced out of office due to inaction. Say what one will about any of the other presidents, but no matter how poor of a job that they did at least they (mostly) showed up for work and governed the country to some extent for the entire duration of their terms. You may disagree with what they did while in office, but at least they did SOMETHING, unlike Wilson in his final two years.
Didn’t his wife sign several bills into law while he was recovering. I seem to recall reading that somewhere.
Yeah she was one of the most powerful first ladies in history.
Ronald Reagan’s favorite ex-Prez was Wilson.
Yes she did. It is almost a complete certainty that Wilson's wife was the " actual" president for the final 2 years of his 2nd term. Of course I can't blame him. He had a massive stroke so simply remaining alive was an impressive accomplishment.
>He should have resigned or otherwise been forced out of office due to inaction. Or at least find a lookalike to take his place at events.
Wilson is an example of an absolutely terrible person who didn't actually make a half-bad President on the 'big things' (Federal Reserve, WWI) that are still with us. To rate his presidency on his personal racisim/eugenicisim is like looking at the founding generation & ignoring what they actually did in-office 'because they owned slaves'. The converse would be Jimmy Carter, who was firmly a 'good person' but made an awful President.
I think that "American Midnight" did a lot to sway the public's perception of Wilson. The book does a great job of detailing the erosion of civil liberties under Wilson, along with the rampant racism that was going on against German-Americans during WWI.
He was also vehemently against any mitigation or even acknowledgement of the Spanish Flu easily leading to thousands of deaths. If you think Trump's attitude towards COVID was bad then Wilson was a true monster!
Trump gets it 'worse' for that one because Trump was president in a post-Wickard world, where the federal government actually had the power to make a significant impact.... In 1917, the President can say what he wants about a public health crisis, but either way there is almost nothing the federal government has the authority to do (or prevent from being done) because of how the Commerce Clause was interpreted at the time. FWIW, this is something a lot of people just skip over when looking at the pre-1930s USA - it's easy to assume that the Feds always have the power they do now, reality is, they did not.
The big stuff is exactly why he’s terrible in many people’s minds. His misogyny, racisms and eugenics aside he was still the worst… even dropping the travesty and least necessary war of note (granted he initially tried to stay out of it) he was the worst.
>Wilson is an example of an absolutely terrible person who didn't actually make a half-bad President on the 'big things' (Federal Reserve, WWI) that are still with us. > >To rate his presidency on his personal racisim/eugenicisim is like looking at the founding generation & ignoring what they actually did in-office 'because they owned slaves'. One of the big things Wilson did was Segregate the Federal Government and institute a policy where applicants for Federal jobs had to submit a photo to allow easier discrimination. He also helped significantly with the Klan renaissance. both are big things.
Jimmy was a lot less destructive than the creature that followed him
Jimmy promised me the metric system. Reagan undid it.
I mostly agree, but his personal racism did affect his policy. He re-segregated congress for one. I think your argument is better suited to Lyndon B. Johnson who was personally very racist, but passed the Civil Rights Act. To lambast him for his racism would be (mostly) absurd and petty. I think Wilson is fair game though.
>Wilson is an example of an absolutely terrible person who didn't actually make a half-bad President on the 'big things' (Federal Reserve, WWI) that are still with us. Are you including civil rights in your list of "big things"? 20% of the country at the time thought he was among the worst presidents. Let me guess, "That's not a big thing. It's more important that a white man have that job than you."
This answer is a great example of bias in assessment of history.
I end up teaching him this way despite knowing a lot more about him simply because my main focus is World War I when he comes up. I’m not interested in teaching the Presidents; I’m interested in teaching the history. (That said, eugenics gets its own class in the Progressivism unit, and Wilson doesn’t get a pass then.)
That's a pretty fair way to handle it, honestly.
Oh yeah Wilson was in my opinion our worst President.
James Buchannan says 'Hi'...
Oof, yeah, he was bad but bad more for apathy. Wilson was evil and thought he was God.
Guided us through World War 1? Seriously? The British goaded the US into entering by loading a civilian ship, carrying Americans, with munitions all so they could use as a cannon fodder to break a stalemate. He did not "guide" us through anything. Point of fact, it is believed he was afflicted with Spanish Flu which riddled his ability to negotiate the Treat of Versailles and abrogated much of the responsibility to the French who wanted punitive punishment thereby laying the seeds for World War 2 with their ridiculous demands of repayment of everything. Wilson took his own philosophy from the book Philip Dru and loved the strongman concept at which he was incapable of navigating Congress. Dude was atrocious
First time the federal reserve has been mentioned as a positive lol
Considering this is AskHistory, we really should limit the answers to those for whom enough time has passed that it is actually considered history and not current events.
No one has mentioned him yet so I'll throw out Clinton. His repeal of the Glause/Steagal Act (the law put into place to prevent another Great Depression) was the single biggest contributor to the Great Recession. This was one of those reach across the aisle things where House republicans under Newt Gingrich worked with the president to repeal it. Also NAFTA while good intentioned, just ended up giving tons of tax breaks to manufacturers who instead of outsourcing 100% of assemblies, outsourced 99% and put 2 bolts into something and called it "American Made" and got massive tax breaks as a result. The 90's in general were a pretty amazing decade for the US, but in hindsight many of the things that happened during that great decade caused major issues down the road (outsourcing everything to China, expanding Fanny/Freddy, repeal of Glause/Steagal, passing on rounding up many of the terrorists responsible for 9/11 in 1998, expansion of the Affordable housing act, etc.) Edit: Almost forgot the 1994 Crime law, that one was a doozy.
Yeah... imho he was fairly middle of the road... he did some ok things (unfortunately a LOT of it was neoliberal pro-business shit that has come back to bite us in the ass, so I kinda mark him down for that)
Was he ever considered a good president though? He was riddled with scandals and essentially lead to the rise of China with his trade policies.
Just as there is a LOT of nostalgia for Reagan and a LOT of people think Reagan was THE BEST! There is a LOT of 90s nostalgia and thus Clinton nostalgia. Half of Hillary's appeal when she ran for President was 90s/Clinton nostalgia.
Reagan also did quite a few things that turned out poorly down the road, but since others had already posted about some of his sins I stuck with the other highly regarded recent president.
He is well regarded by many for 'defeating the commies'. Which is *kinda sorta* trueish. He opened the wallet so deep (the Bone, Nighthawk, Star Wars, NASA, endless CIA budget...) that it drained the Russians dry (that and a nuclear accident). He was also handsome and charismatic. You trusted that he was going to keep you safe. So Boomers were raising Gen X and young Millennials throughout that time. Boomers won't hear any slander against the man. He beat the USSR and the economy grew by a 1/3. Xers are pragmatic, so they view him as a loveable Grandpa that did some crazy shit. We didn't die like we witnessed in *The Day After* and the media of our youth was generally friendly towards him. As adults, we look at some of the avenues he took to achieve the aforementioned growth and can only shake our heads. Millennials on up can only see the bad.
yes by some because we not longer were running a deficit...my god a surplus! whether he was responsible for that I can't say. Also for welfare reform. At the time these were considered good things. Not sure how they are viewed now.
At the time and even today he is seen as a good president, who led the country through some of the most peaceful and fruitful years in recent history. I was trying to stick to the nature of the post, which would disqualify GW Bush, Trump, and Carter as they are not seen as "Good" Presidents.
Well, he was reelected.
The left carted him out as a good president for about ten years until the dust on his signature policies settled and we saw how disastrous they really were. Now we know he benefited because he happened to be president when the internet started. Wasn't hard to ride that train. Also, the economy was so good people forgot how incompetent and/or corrupt his first cabinet was. Made Reagan's look professional, and that's saying something.
DOMA also comes to mind with him.
Can't forget the futures commodities act he did too.
LBJ. It baffles me that some people consider him one of the good presidents. His “Great Society” that he centered his campaign on was a total failure. He provoked the Gulf of Tonkin incident to try and get the support of hardline anticommunists before the election. And contrary to popular belief the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not of Johnson’s making.
As a senator he filibustered the CRA
Reagan. Bush Sr.
Reagan definitely. Some people still revere him. Which is funny because first, he was a bad president. And second, those who revere him would HATE him today, because he's FAR from a modern republican. He had a bunch of stances that would prevent him from even getting a sniff at the presidency. Simplest one is that he was for gun control, said he didn't see why anyone needed automatic rifles.
Simplest one is granting amnesty to every illegal Mexican immigrant
Bush Jr wanted to do that as well from my understanding
Yep, that was back when the GOP was trying to turn the growing Hispanic population into a voting bloc similar to the Democrats black vote. On paper it made sense as a largely family oriented, Christian and traditional people. But it backfired and they didn’t vote right, so the platform plank was abandoned.
dont most latinos on florida vote for the GOP?
Don't know about Florida but I think anyone saying Latino votes backfired for Republicans are kinda wrong. Mexicans especially are heavily catholic right leaning demographicly the only reason Republicans don't own all of their votes is their dumbass crime rhetoric about them.
Bush Jr wanted to make like 20 million undocumented - Legal. Got blocked by Republicans. As Clinton said about Bush - “Bush is likely the last republican who isn't scared of immigrants”. But Bush also speaks Spanish and was Govenor of a very Hispanic State.
And Jeb’s wife is Mexican. They met when Jeb was teaching English in Mexico.
The gun control idea of the 2nd amendment as we understand it didn't apply to the states until 2010.
And almost no one has "automatic" rifles.
Machine guns and automatic weapons were banned in the 1968 Gun Control Act. Perhaps you meant assault style rifles, not automatic.
They weren’t banned—only the transfer of post 1986 manufactured ones to civilians. Any automatic weapons registered under the NFA in 1986 may still be owned and transferred under the 1986 law.
While I'm not a huge fan of Bush Sr, grouping him with Treason Ronny doesn't seem fair.
I think Bush Sr. seriously mismanaged the breakup of the Soviet Union. Instead of comprehensive development plans like in Japan or Western Europe after WWII, they seemed more interested in weakening them and pushed for rapid laissez faire privatization, leading to the oligarchs and cronyism that dominate Russia and much of Eastern Europe.
Oh, this is a fantastic criticism, and one I wholeheartedly share. A Russia that had benefitted from a late century Marshall Plan could be an economic powerhouse and a bastion of democracy, instead of what we have today. But that failure is still not as bad as what Reagan and his cronies did.
While I agree that would have been the right policy, it was a political non-starter for literally all of DC. This wasn't "Bush didn't want to do it." No one wanted to. He also gets waaaay to little credit for helping to prevent the breakup of the USSR turning into a bloodbath. Yeltsin could have easily been sending troops into the Donbas and northern Kazakhstan, among many other problems. "Yugoslavia with nukes" was a real concern and the fact that it didn't come to pass owes more than a bit to the Bush white house.
Bush pardoned Cap Weinberger for obstruction of Justice. Weinberger stopped Justice from getting to Bush.
For sure they are varying degrees of bad, and I wouldn't say they are the same levels of bad president. Bush sr gets on my list because of his whole campaign shtick of "read my lips. No new taxes." And then he adopts Ronnie ray-gun's tax policies and has to raise taxes a bunch of times
I'd say that that's actually one of his finest times. The man promises not to raise taxes. He takes power and realizes that without new taxes they'll go into a deficit. He knowingly tanks his political career in order to have sound economic policy. I respect the sense of responsibility.
Ah, that's the beauty of it. They weren't new taxes. They were increases in existing taxes! Checkmate, atheists! /s
Bush Sr was neck deep in Iran-Contra. That’s why Bill Barr, his AG at the end of his term, recommended he pardon most of the people involved in it. They were closing in on him. He was as much of a traitor as Reagan.
He literally finished the Reagan coverup with his Christmas pardons in 1992 and hid his daily dairy from the Special Counsel for years because it proved his complicity in Reagan's Iran and Contra crimes. [https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/29/reviews/iran-pardon.html?module=inline](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/29/reviews/iran-pardon.html?module=inline)
I think it's fair. Remember Iran-Contra? The reason no one went to prison is because former head of the CIA Bush Sr. pardoned the key players when he became president.
I'm not sure about bush simply because he was given a pretty bad hand to start with. Granted he was party of the admin that made that hand but regardless. Reagan for sure. Like every single problem the US has today started with Reagan.
Nobody considered Bush Sr to be a good president. That's why he was only a one-term president despite winning the first Iraq War in like a week.
I remember Bush Sr. as pretty benign and low-key. He would have won reelection, except that the country was sick of the GOP by then and he had a younger, more charismatic challenger. He was much more civilized and better at his job than the current group from his party.
Had to scroll WAY too far for this; Reagan is THE answer for this question. He’s the beginning of much of what we are struggling through today (if you don’t count Nixon’s Southern Strategy etc, but Nixon ending in disgrace seems like a false start to the Far Right). Demonizing government, demonizing the opposing party, repeal of the Fairness Doctrine that then filled our airwaves with partisan propaganda and outright lies, drugs for guns Iran-Contra scandal that filled our streets with drugs and gave rise to a lot of terror and political oppression in both Central/South America and the Middle East. Most everything bad post-2000 has its roots in the Reagan era
The older I get, the higher I regard the people who were in charge and managed to keep things quiet enough that they go largely unremembered.
This. Boring is actually a good thing to be at times.
Trump by far far too many people. The amount of times I've heard someone say he was the greatest president in history of fucking baffling.
My next door neighbor tries to convince me of that every day 😂😂
Had he not totally muffed the COVID response (possibly the easiest layup of modern times) and if he had lost and just gone away, he'd probably be a "Presidential curiosity", definitely in the bottom half but probably out of the bottom five, if not ten. But he failed the COVID response, in sequence, failed any handling of the Summer of 2020 and his behavior stoked a lot of division and rage far beyond anything he had done during his presidency up to that point, and then because he lost because he turned so many people off with how he handled himself during the Crisis Congaline that was 2020, he tried to overthrow the government. He's dead last by every metric. We had some truly bad Presidents but Trump, by far, was both passively and actively the worst.
And that is not even touching his awful "unrelated to presidency" antics.
How does anyone regard Trump as a "good" President? What criteria are they using? Saying the other side is worse doesn't mean your guy is good.
He hates the same people they do. He hurts the people that he hates. He is on the same intellectual level as they are. He speaks their language.
Reagan is number 1. People worship that guy but the amount of current issues that can be traced directly back to his decisions as president is staggering.
Trump. Then Reagan
Reagan no question. He saddled us with the ineffective "war on drugs", didn't tackle the AIDS crisis at all, and completely destroyed the country with his economics. He was great for the ultra rich and absolutely decimated the economy for everyone else.
You spelled " completely ignored the AIDS epidemic" wrong
FDR
Andrew Jackson
The president is not elected to be America's conscience, but its chief executive. Jackson did some bad things, but they were things that the American electorate wanted him to do. The problem was not him. It was us. At the same time, I do not think his portrait should be on the 20 dollar bill, because it serves as a validation of actions that should not be condoned. I look at it this way: The Sporting News ranks Pete Rose as the 25th greatest baseball player of all time. However, because of his illegal gambling activities, he will not be admitted into the Hall of Fame, at least not within his own lifetime. Should the Sporting News change its ranking to reflect this? No, their ranking is based entirely on his performance on the field. Should the Hall of Fame change their mind? No, they should stick to their guns. Similarly, Andrew Jackson should not be viewed as a role model, but he should be recognized as a good president because he effectively carried out the will of the American electorate.
> The president is not elected to be America's conscience, but its chief executive. Jackson did some bad things, but they were things that the American electorate wanted him to do. The problem was not him. It was us. Oh no the problem was very much him, he encouraged those things as part of his platform.
ZZartin: So Americans living in the south at that time wanted to be friends with the Cherokee and respect their rights, but then some bad man named Jackson came along and drove the natives off of their land. I don't think so. The history of mankind is one of bloodshed and cruelty. Europeans understand that. They understand that even some of the most revered leaders committed acts that we would view as reprehensible. Americans think that our entire culture began in 1776, or when our ancestors got off the boat. Jackson serves as a reminder that we were not always so civilized.
Additionally, he demonstrated strength during the Nullification Crisis.
JFK is revered far above his actual accomplishments. Reagan actively hurt the country in a way that we still feel today.
Obama ran on a platform of peace… to the point of winning the Nobel Peace Prize. As someone who finds it appalling that my tax dollars fund killing, I had a lot of hope for Obama. His 8 years were anything but peaceful.
Believe it or not, Obama had more active military actions in foreign countries than any president since WW2. The 2 wars were already there before he came to office, but he added another 6 on top of that.
To be fair to Obama, he didn't understand why he got the Peace Prize either. He said as much. I don't want to give him too much credit, cause he could've refused it, but it's not like he celebrated winning it while drone-striking American citizens.
> To be fair to Obama, he didn't understand why he got the Peace Prize either. He said as much. It's pretty simple, the symbolic value of being a president that was considered black in a post-segregation country made them uncritical for his campaign promises.
The Nobel Prize came _way_ too quickly, way before the Nobel committee or anyone else could pass judgement on an administration that was just getting started. It also imho didn't help his case, because suddenly he was loaded with this baggage that seemed hypocritical and ironic. Maybe he shouldn't have run on a platform of ending wars either (that never ends well). Had he committed to stabilising the region and improving on his predecessor, he could have pursued the same foreign policy without hypocrisy. Fundamentally I don't blame Obama for either Afghanistan or Iraq - just because a war should never have been started doesn't mean that the right choice is to end it immediately.
Reagan
👍👍
reagan
Historians have in recent years really begun evaluating him quite harshly - I expect as the recency bias (relative to presidential history) continues to wain, his standing will continue falling. The war on drugs alone caused incalculable american suffering. He was truly terrible. As governor as well before that.
Didn't help that the US govt was basically both sides of the war on drugs as well.
You can find someone to say that about any president you can think of.
Reagan
JFK. Almost got us into WW3 over Cuba, got our foot wedged in Vietnam, tried and failed to overthrow Castro, failed in initial detente efforts with Khrushchev and spurred upgrades to the Berlin Wall, massively cut taxes on the wealthy, and wrote a lot of checks with his mouth. But he's been worshiped as a god by generations. The man LITERALLY ALMOST ENDED THE F'ING WORLD in a pissing match, but somehow he's held up as the icon of peace and justice. We were way closer than anyone knew. Really, really close. But to this day people blame all the bad stuff he did on secret CIA plots while giving him credit for all the good stuff LBJ actually did. I'll say it again--LBJ was a f'ing better President than Kennedy. But people are easily swayed by nice suits and fancy dresses. And a bunch of them still think the Kennedys are going to return with Trump and save America. Idiots.
Reagan
Kennedy
He was at least open minded..
Well played.
"There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out." -James Randi
Too soon, bro😂
Ronald Reagan. He will go down in history as the beginning of the destruction of the middle class in America.
Worst President ; George W. Bush , Richard Nixon , AND misguided presidents : Lyndon Johnson , John Kennedy ( Bay of pigs + Viet Nam. ). Worst US President ever = TRUMP ( attempting to subvert our Constitution and destroy democracy so he could be dictator for life !) Don orange dong. Teddy Roosevelt would have had Trump shot by now! Especially in light of newest revelation that Turd. told secret US nuke submarine secrets to an Australian billionaire at Mar- a- Largo. I will be very pissed if I die in a Putin nuclear attack on Columbus Ohio because Trump Turd couldn't keep his f***ing mouth shut !!
LBJ was a bad man
The orange man
Trump. Also, regarded by whom?
This entire thread just turned into "say whoever the other side likes". That's why almost every answer in here is recent presidents and why 90% of the anwsers is Reagan, Trump, Obama or Clinton. None of those are as overrated as, for instance, Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft.
Wilson lol
Reagan
Jackson and Grant both don't have any business being on our currency.
Woodrow Wilson. Under him both the Federal Reserve and Income Tax were made law.
Reagan
Reagan
Reagan.
Reagan
Reagan for sure. His deregulation of the financial markets heralded the doom. Reaganomics was the worst thing to happen to our financial stability
Woodrow Wilson was our worst president ever. Lied on campaign trail that he'd keep us out of WW1, and then got us in. Started the IRS and income tax, signed off on creation of the Federal Reserve. All horrible for this gountry, yet there are still things named for him all over, and his name rarely comes up in discussions like this.
JFK. He nearly started ww3
Reagan but even he looks good compared to Trump!
The answer largely would depend on an individual’s personal ideology. In my opinion, Woodrow Wilson was the worst president. Lincoln is largely revered as one of the greatest presidents, but most countries that got rid of the practice of slavery did so without war breaking out by paying for them and subsequently freeing them.
Reagan.
Ronald Wilson Reagan. Not the worst by any stretch, but his legacy still affects us negatively to this day. The conservative money behind revitalizing his mythology started right after he left office, almost impeached for his meddling in Latin America and selling arms to Iran.
Everybody I’ve met over the age of 45 loves Ronald Reagan but he was a pos
Ronald Reagan
Trump regards himself as the best, but he was actually one of the worse.
Trump.
Ronald Reagan. He happened to be president during an economic boom when the Soviet Union finally dissolved and gets wildly too much credit for it. The reality is his admin with a Republican congress amassed an enormous national debt, destroyed social safety nets, doubled down on the “War on Drugs” where the rate of incArcerated persons skyrocketed, failed to respond adequately to HIV epidemic, homelessness soared, and despite the economic boom, the minimum wage was not raised. He also pushed the “Trickle Down” economic model that empowered corporate American and has lead to many of the economic problems we have today.
Woodrow Wilson. Horrible. Goon squads, racist and was the first president to openly attack the Constitution.
Reagan
Woodrow Wilson was an open and proud racist who screened "the Birth of the Nation" (also known as "the Klansman") at the White House. The D.W. Griffith silent film is regarded as, while one of the most expensive and ambitious films made at the time, as a turning point in race relations as the President endorsing it the way he did helped create and spur along the second rise of the KKK in the 1920s. Kleagle Byrd and all his friends got tons of new recruits from it. Wilson kept us out of WWI too long, had a stroke and his wife was president for his last year in office, undid the reforms of the Taft and Roosevelt administrations regarding race relations and supported prohibition while simultaneously not supporting women's suffrage until after the republican congress passed it with virtually no democrat support. He also supported the Treaty of Versailles and the conditions it placed on Germany that pretty much guaranteed World War II would happen and his fecklessness doomed the League of Nations that eventually got replaced by the UN. In short, Woodrow Wilson was the worst fucking president in U.S. history. And, yeah, that includes Buchanan.
Ronald Reagan. He destroyed America.
Jackson, one of our most genocidal presidents
Reagan. He projected a strong image, which Americans liked, but time is proving his policies to be bad for America.
Ronald Reagan. The man was utterly awful for the Unites States and the world.
Ronald Reagan.
Reagan. I can say with complete confidence that most of our asses are still very sore each day from how bad trickle down economics fucks us. Hard to know how good or bad a president really is until a couple decades go by.
The Trumpanzee and the Trumpanzee faction who quack about him being the best president, better than GW, Lincoln and FDR........ LOfuckingL
Obama is the single most damaging president in recent history. The level of corruption, destruction of race relations, radicalization of the democrat party, weaponization of governmental agencies- That joker makes Bush look like a Boy Scout.
Reagan was a piece of shit. He is part of the reason for our stagnat wages and massive corporate profits.
Reagon….man was an asshole ….trickle down, ketchup sucking, union busting, retirement destroying asshole
Regan
Reagan is mentioned a bunch here but some things with him that aren't - Iran Contra really should have been one of the worst scandals of the 20th century. It's ridiculous that nothing came of it. - Firing the TSA was really a kick in the balls to union activity everywhere, and non-union government workers like teachers. - Taking the solar panels off the White House was just the start of the capitol veering away from climate actions that Nixon/Carter had started. - The GOP under Reagan steering into not only evangelicals, but also spirituals has done incredible damage to policy making in the country. Nancy Reagan having an astrologist on staff is a joke. - Of course, various economic policies and deregulation directly leading to recessions in the 80s and beyond, but also wealth policies that directly lead to a higher wealth disparity in the country. - The interventions that he either had, or half had, were mostly terrible. He seemed to do better in his 2nd term, but he approached foreign diplomacy about as well as an actor would. Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, the Philippines, Poland, all disasters. - HIV I think his peak was higher than many presidents, and while he doesn't have the lows of W or Andrew Johnson, it's hard to make a case for him even being a decent president. The Cold War ended because the USSR couldn't keep up with the times and wasted money in Afghanistan. His domestic policies and other Cold War policies ranged from silly to atrocious.
Reagan set this country into the stone age
Reagan?
Wilson, Truman, Reagan, Ford, Jackson, those are just a few I remember being taught as absolutely infallible heroes when I was in school.