The Worst President in History

I’m not a Presidential scholar, but I’ve heard that James Buchanan is the President most often designated as the worst in history. Buchanan failed to head off the Civil War—as did Lincoln, often cited as the best President. Andrew Johnson strikes me as a stronger contender for worst—he did his best to lose the peace after the North won the Civil War. President Grant, who followed Johnson, stood up for civil rights, but after him the South rewrote our history and has been disenfranchising people of color ever since, particularly right now in Georgia.  

My view is that the worst President has served in the last 100 years. Hoover, to start with, is given bad marks for his inability to rally the country during the Great Depression. Reagan suffered from dementia while leading the Free World, so to speak. Nixon dribbled paranoia and has gone down in history as a crook. That’s worse than dementia. George W. Bush, a dumbass, attacked the wrong country and threw the whole Middle East into a cycle of violence that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. But Donald Trump, a malignant narcissist, seems to be in a class by himself: more demented than Reagan, more paranoid and crooked than Nixon, more feckless and incompetent than Bush.