Which modern presidents are most commonly compared to historically poor-performing presidents?
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Executive summary
Contemporary commentators most frequently liken recent presidents—above all Donald Trump, and to a lesser degree recent Republicans seen as economic or communications failures—to the long-standing roster of historically worst-rated chiefs such as Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover; those four names repeatedly anchor academic “worst” lists that serve as the touchstones for modern comparisons [1] [2]. Historians’ and journalists’ rankings provide the benchmarks; public-policy analyses that link modern partisan policy and macroeconomic outcomes also encourage analogies between modern Republican presidencies and historically poor performance [3] [4].
1. Why historians’ “bottom five” set the standard
Academic and media rankings repeatedly identify a small group of presidents—Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Warren Harding and Franklin Pierce—as perennial bottom-dwellers, and those names function as the shorthand for “worst” in subsequent commentary [1]. Major surveys—C-SPAN’s historian poll and Siena’s expert surveys—use multi‑category scales and consistently place those 19th‑century and early‑20th‑century figures at the bottom, which makes them natural comparators when writers or scholars seek a historical analogue for contemporary misrule [3] [1]. This entrenched consensus is what allows a modern presidency to be framed as “the worst since…” or “on par with…,” because readers recognize the canonical list [5].
2. Donald Trump: the most-commonly compared modern president
Among modern figures, Donald Trump appears most often in comparisons to the historical worsts; Siena’s recent surveys explicitly add Trump to the cohort discussed as poorly rated, noting that he now draws attributes—luck, risk‑taking, party leadership—that change his placement but still push him toward lower rankings [1]. The C‑SPAN and other expert polls show Trump receiving poor scores across the standard ten leadership categories, which fuels media pieces that place him alongside the established “failures” when evaluating moral authority, adherence to norms and crisis leadership [3]. Journalists and commentators therefore use the entrenched worst‑president roster as the frame for assessing Trump’s historical standing [1] [3].
3. Herbert Hoover and economic analogies
When discourse centers on economic collapse or policy failure, Herbert Hoover remains the principal historical foil; broad media rankings and themed lists regularly invoke Hoover as shorthand for economic mismanagement and harmful policy that deepened the Great Depression [2]. Contemporary analysts who emphasize partisan economic patterns also prime comparisons: a Joint Economic Committee Democrats’ analysis highlights that most modern-era recessions began under Republican presidents and contrasts macroeconomic performance under recent Republicans and Democrats—an empirical frame that often nudges commentators to liken modern Republican administrations to Hoover‑era outcomes [4].
4. Other modern presidents and less frequent comparisons
Beyond Trump and occasional Hoover analogies, modern comparisons are more diffuse: some columnists liken short‑tenure or scandal‑tainted presidencies to Warren Harding for corruption or to Andrew Johnson for political failures during crises such as reconstruction and national division, but the sources show these are less uniformly applied than the Trump‑to‑worst and Hoover‑economic parallels [1] [2]. Surveys also underscore the difficulty of making direct comparisons—historians caution that context, measurement criteria and changing norms make one‑to‑one analogies imprecise, which tempers scholarly willingness to place living or recent presidents definitively at the bottom [5] [3].
5. Limits of the available reporting and alternative viewpoints
The reporting establishes which historical names dominate “worst” narratives and documents that Trump is the modern president most frequently compared to them, but it does not provide a comprehensive, quantified accounting of every media analogy across outlets or measure audience acceptance of those comparisons [1] [3]. Alternative views—represented in methodological discussions—stress that rankings depend on chosen criteria and often favor older, traditionally assessed presidents; some scholars argue rankings can reflect the demographics and politics of the survey sample as much as objective performance, a caveat that complicates direct historical analogies [5] [6].