Media pretty excited a bunch of political scientists have ranked Trump the worst president ever

If they do this every four years, then every survey requires them to rank a president who's either been in office only a year or, in some cases, would be a year into his second term. How you can even give an assessment of a first-year president's "greatness" is beyond me, but I guess anyone can grab a number out of his head to represent a guy he just plain can't stand. Typically the presidents at the bottom either got us into an awful war, screwed up the economy or found themselves mired in a serious scandal. Trump hasn't done any of that, but he keeps tweeting, so someone has to be #45:

Nearly 200 of America's top political scientists have voted Donald Trump the worst president in US history. According to the 2018 Presidents & Executive Politics Presidential Greatness Survey, Mr Trump ranks even lower than disgraced President Richard Nixon – even among conservatives. Abraham Lincoln, unsurprisingly, takes the top prize. Mr Nixon sits at 33. The study, conducted every four years, surveys social science researchers from the American Political Science Association’s section on presidents and executive politics. It asks the experts to rank each president’s greatness on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being great, 50 being average, and 0 being a total failure. Mr Trump averaged a score of 12.34, bumping James Buchanan – the president who saw the US descend into the Civil War – out of the bottom spot. The result comes just months after Trump finished his first year in office as the most unpopular president in modern history.

I'm not prepared to ascribe "greatness" to Trump - certainly not at this point - given that we're still stuck with ObamaCare and that spending blowout he signed into law last week is going to continue us on a fiscal path that could lead to utter catastrophe in the next few decades.

But there's a difference between making your own messes and failing to clean up the messes of others, and the latter is what we're talking about here. Trump gets maybe one demerit for failing to get these things done with a Congress of his own party, but the Congress itself deserves most of the blame for being so dysfunctional in the first place. And you can't let the voters off the hook, either, for refusing to elect a majority that's willing to be serious about spending discipline. A president's "greatness" is a complicated proposition, no? But name me another abject presidential failure who achieved all this in his first year. And that includes a fair amount that Trump did via legal use of his executive authority, not as a substitute for congressional action but as a way of restoring the constitutional balance of power. For the most part, this survey is a pretty ridiculous exercise. The only accurate score you could give Trump at this point would be incomplete. The impact of a president's decisions and policies have to be measured over the course of years - even decades - so we can see what their impact was. Apparently these same political scientists think they've seen enough to rank Barack Obama in the top 10, which is pretty generous to a guy who averaged less than 2.0 percent GDP growth throughout his entire presidency. Then again, Trump keeps tweeting, so . . .

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