Worst President Ever

Max Boot does a good job laying out why Trump is the worst president ever, by cataloguing his misdeeds...since April.  If you just took the maladministration and corruption from 2020, he would likely rank as the very worst president ever.  But let's look at the competition.

The only president whose personal corruption comes close to Trump's is Nixon. His personal involvement in the Watergate crimes (and quite a few others, including prolonging the Vietnam war by scuttling 1968 peace talks).  Nixon's primary crimes were about power not personal wealth.  Trump's pardon of Roger Stone, interference in the Michael Flynn prosecution and firing of Inspector Generals qualifies as a Nixonian level of corruption.  We can, of course, throw in his impeachment for the Ukraine affair.  So, in 2020 alone, he's worse than Nixon.

The only presidents less competent at the basic task of doing his job are Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan. Those two non-entities were elected president because they were "doughfaces," Northern Democrats who were OK with slavery and its expansion. As the nation began to burn with the fires that led to the Civil War, they mostly made things worse or simply proved unequal to the job -wedded to an extreme states rights ideology. However, my belief is that there was little Buchanan could do by the time he was president. Seward was right, it was an irrepressible conflict.  Trump, however, has overseen the return of an extreme states rights...well, it's not an ideology so much as a default. The federal government has simply stopped governing in the face of a pandemic that has killed at least 137,000 Americans and will likely blow past 200,000 before August gets here.

Even Herbert Hoover made some small efforts to arrest the Great Depression.  They were meager and unequal to the task, but he at least tried to move outside his comfort zone with things like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the beginning of some aid to states. Trump's entire plan for the economy is to "re-open" and kill more Americans...which will cause the economy to shudder back to a halt.

(I'm leaving George W. Bush off this list as being too recent to properly evaluate. Bush shared Trump's lack of basic curiosity about the way the world actually works, but he was not a fundamentally horrible human being, just a slob who ceded his presidency to actual horrible human beings.)

Finally, there is my pick for worst pre-Trump President: Andrew Johnson. Like Johnson, Trump has ripped open racial wounds, embraced white supremacy and hampered the efforts to make America a more just nation.  Johnson was intemperate, egotistical and ill-educated like Trump, but unlike Trump, Johnson was not personally corrupt, and Johnson ultimately bowed to Congressional pressure.

As someone said, Trump is not only the worst president ever, he's the worst American ever.

As of now, the only Republican to condemn Trump's brazenly corrupt pardon of Stone is Mitt Romney.  There is only one principled Republican left in Congress.  The fish rots from the head, but it rots all the way down.