Happy Presidents' Day. Truck Fump.
Let’s put this to rest: Donald Trump is the worst president in American history. The title is his and his alone, not up for grabs, not even among staunchly conservative historians; even they put him in the bottom three, beside James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. The most recent broad-based poll of political experts stows Trump thoroughly dead last. He far outpaced the other lowly beasts.
We won’t enumerate the reasons why Trump is the worst, because we have been doing it here, in this space, ad nauseam, for three years. But we need not leave it at that. There are other layers of “worsts” to examine.
Is Trump the worst thing ever to happen to the United States?
No, that would be slavery and the resulting Civil War, which I twin as number one. I believe Trump weighs in at Number Two, as it were, just ahead of The Great Depression. He has already done more lasting damage than it did.
Of all the presidents, is Trump the biggest asshole?
Yes. No contest. We rely for our judgment here on a definition of the very word by Aaron James, a professor of philosophy who specializes in social and political ethics and author of the 2014 book (predating the Trumpian disaster) — “Assholes: A Theory.” James wrote that a true asshole “is the guy who systematically allows himself special advantages in cooperative life out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.” Over the years the following corollaries have been added by others: Obnoxiousness, vulgarity, and smallness of spirit. Trump is there. There’s a long dropoff to number two, who would be Richard Nixon.
Q: Is Trump the stupidest president?
A tough call — what is “stupid”? He is certainly the most aggressively ignorant. Even Andrew Johnson, who never went to school at all and learned to read only at 17, tutored by his new wife, had a far better grasp of the the sorts of facts and principles that even ordinary citizens should know. Trump thinks windmills cause cancer. Magnets don’t work when wet. Frederick Douglass is still alive and doing well. Azerbaijan is Cambodia. Iceland is Greenland.
Q: Is Trump the most racist president?
A: The competition here is twofold: Andrew Jackson, who owned slaves and slaughtered Indians, and Woodrow Wilson, who re-segregated the federal workforce and who refused to shake a Black person’s hands unless he (Wilson) was wearing gloves. Both very, very bad.
Trump wins because his racism exists in a time where there is no extenuation for judging someone by the times they lived in —the way we do when trying to figure out whether Babe Ruth would still be a superstar today. Trump has no excuse, flimsy or otherwise. And the destructiveness of his racism is global. Dismantling of USAID alone will wind up killing hundreds of thousands of Black people, if not millions.
Q: Is Trump the most cognitively impaired president?
A: No, he is the second most. The prize here has to go to Woodrow Wilson, in his final year and a half in office. A stroke had left him mentally incapacitate —wildly impulsive and incapable of coherent thought — though this was not acknowledged at the time. During this period, the country was basically run by his wife. She did a decent job.
Then, Trump. Compared to Trump, Joe Biden — even at his lowest point — was Nelson Mandela.
Q: Is Trump the least qualified president?
Yes. It’s a close race between him and Warren Harding, whom historians have described as “intellectually overwhelmed.” Harding was so aware of his threadbare qualifications and insufficiencies that he once confessed to a journalist: “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.”
But Harding had a resume. He had been a (mediocre) U.S. senator and a newspaper publisher. Trump’s resume was: 1) perpetually failed businessman, and 2) reality TV buffoon. Also — and this is key — at least Harding knew he was an incompetent. There’s a certain competence to that.
Q: Is Trump the most personally revolting president?
His only real competitor here is Lyndon Johnson, who enjoyed humiliating and intimidating underlings, even summoning them for meetings in the bathroom while he was pooping. So that’s bad.
Trump wins this one because is revolting in many more ways. He’s expanded the realm of “revolting.” His taste in design is vulgar. His taste in women is vulgar. He is an ingrate. He is a braggart. He is petty. He is acquisitive. He is mean-spirited. Hey, you want revolting? He applies bronzer to his face with a trowel.
One important similarity. Both Trump and Johnson were particularly disgusting in matters involving ball rooms. (You will want to listen to this if you haven’t heard it already.)
Q: Is Trump the lyingest president?
A: Yes. He’ll lie about everything and anything, even where the lie is preposterously obvious to anyone with eyes and ears and at least semi-functioning brain. We’ll prove it with the next question and answer.
Q: Is Trump the fattest president? How do we weigh in on this?
A: Almost certainly not, but it’s actually hard to answer this because he lies so blatantly about his weight By sheer inspection, Trump’s BMI is clearly lower than William Howard Taft’s, and probably slight;y less than Grover Cleveland’s, so he waddles in there in the third position.
But, we can’t be sure. Consider:
That cartoon is by the great caricaturist Trevor Stone Irvin.
If we are to believe Trump’s most repeated boast, he is 6 foot three and weighs 225 pounds. Here is a man who has been publicly weighed, by well-adjusted scales, who is, indisputably, 6 foot three and weighs 225 pounds:
I rest my case.
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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:
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Hey, want to see another disgusting thing??
Check this out, from yesterday’s print edition of The Washington Post:
Sunset? Sunset?
Why not just say “sent to live on a farm in the country”?
The current management of The Washington Post deserves everyone’s contempt.
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Good. We are done for the day. Please send Questions and Observations here:
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