Who is the worst us president
Executive summary
Historians and expert surveys most commonly name James Buchanan as the single worst U.S. president for his failure to check the slide toward Civil War, though recent polls that mix contemporary criteria and partisan perspectives sometimes place Donald Trump at or near the bottom as well [1] [2] [3]. Disagreement about a singular “worst” reflects competing methods—historical context versus contemporary political damage—and differing agendas among pollsters and commentators [4] [5].
1. Historians’ consensus: Buchanan as the exemplar of presidential failure
Multiple long-standing expert surveys and syntheses of presidential rankings identify James Buchanan as the worst president because he exacerbated sectional tensions and failed to prevent secession and civil war, a judgment reflected in C‑SPAN and other historian polls cited by U.S. News, Mental Floss and Siena Research Institute summaries [1] [2] [4].
2. Recent upheavals: where contemporary polls place Donald Trump
Some newer rankings—especially those incorporating recent events, legal troubles, and contemporary standards of morality or administrative skill—have placed Donald Trump at or near rock bottom, including a 2024 edition that scored Trump lowest and media accounts noting his unique divisiveness and the January 6 attack as factors in scholars’ ratings [5] [3] [6].
3. Why different polls produce different “worst” presidents
Discrepancies arise because polls use different metrics—some rate crisis leadership and long‑range consequences (which penalize mid‑19th‑century presidents like Buchanan and Pierce), while others weight public persuasion, moral authority, or recent actions that can sharply lower the scores of living or recent presidents; Siena and APSA surveys explicitly measure multiple attributes and show repeated bottom‑ranking names but also reveal partisan splits in evaluations [4] [7] [5].
4. The role of partisanship, methodology and media framing
Scholars and commentators have warned that rankings can reflect ideological bias or media narratives: critics argue that conservative or liberal compositions of panels shift results, while outlets averaging polls produce different lists than crowd‑ranked websites—Ranker’s user votes differ from scholar surveys, and commentators note accusations of bias in some rankings [5] [8] [4].
5. A reasoned conclusion: worst by historical consequence vs. worst by contemporary harm
If “worst” is defined by long‑term national catastrophe and failure to avert existential crisis, the weight of historians’ expert surveys points to James Buchanan; if “worst” means the most recent or morally culpable presidency given immediate threats to democratic norms and rule of law, contemporary rankings and commentary have increasingly singled out Donald Trump—both claims are supported in the record, and the disparity reflects different normative standards rather than a single objective metric [1] [2] [3] [6].
6. What this tells readers about ranking presidents and the limits of final answers
Scholarly rankings are useful heuristics but not definitive verdicts: long‑term historical judgment can shift as new evidence and shifting values change emphasis, and media or public lists often reflect present‑day political stakes; surveys like Siena, C‑SPAN and APSA document persistent bottom‑ranked figures (Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Harding, Pierce) while also showing that recent presidents can quickly rise or fall depending on which attributes are prioritized [4] [9] [7].