President Donald Trump is not the worst president in American history. At least, not yet, anyway, but he is on track to winning that title.
Americans have been almost totally in sync when it comes to our opinion of Trump, who is going to go down in history as an orange emoji, clown emoji.
44 soared into the office on the wave of a small fanbase of people willing to accept absolutely anything that comes out of his mouth as reality, regardless of the fact that it contradicts things he said before, as long as he keeps repeating tired phrases like “make America great again” and “build the wall.” He has the lowest approval ratings in history, and Americans have resoundingly agreed that so far, he is the worst president we’ve ever had.
But I’d like to make the case that he’s not. Not because he’s not dangerous, or because his plans don’t include atrocities and irreparable harm to the fabric of American society. But because the reality is we have a history of electing shockingly inhumane figures to office - Trump is only the latest.
Consider Andrew Jackson, currently ranked number 15 on the list (he used to be in the top 10). His position has only recently dropped as people started to care about the full scale of the impact he had on Native Americans.
Andrew Jackson bore the nicknames “Indian Killer” and “Sharp Knife” for a reason - the man had an open, fiery loathing for the original and oldest residents of the land he presided over. He personally ordered the massacre of thousands of Native Americans and forcefully relocated thousands more out of their homeland in the now-infamous Trail of Tears, which left scores of Native Americans dead in its wake. He has a shameful body count, more so than Trump, and he deserved to soar to the top of the list.
For your consideration, I also present James Polk, who pushed for war to snatch Mexican territory away from Native Americans as well, and was a fierce advocate for slavery and against abolitionists. Then there’s President Woodrow Wilson, who tried to re-segregate the government and openly supported the Ku Klux Klan as a good and worthy organization.
And Franklin D. Roosevelt, long considered a champion for some liberals willing to overlook a few historical inconveniences, ordered hundreds of thousands of American citizens of Japanese descent to be rounded up and forced into camps in one of the most humiliating and shocking acts of exclusion in post-WW1 American history.
And Andrew Johnson tried his absolute best to prevent the Civil War from undoing White superiority in the United States and made it unbelievably clear he was on the side of the Confederates, granting them pardons, returning their lands and trying to block Amendments 14 and 15, which banned slavery and discrimination based on race.
So here’s the reality of American history: it’s ugly, and it’s full of politicians who were dangerous and harmful for vulnerable minorities both inside and outside the United States. We’ve never been a country just full to the brim with goodness and responsibility - it’s far more normal for us to have a Trump than an Obama.
But that should change. That must change, if we want to be proud of the United States in any measure. Our past does not have to define us, and although Trump is only the most modern strain of a long history of racism and bigotry in the United States, he’s nothing new and overwhelming. We can defeat him before he earns a place at the top of the list of worst presidents, and we can change the trajectory of American history.