Trump recycled a ranking reflecting midcentury liberal preferences just so he could call himself the ‘greatest.’
Donald Trump yesterday took time out from his “let them eat lakes” campaign to post on the internet a ranking of the U.S. presidents, with himself at the top as “Greatest”:
There are many outrageous things about this hierarchy, but as usual, it is almost certainly the case that Trump put no more thought into this than seeing a meme that praised him and sharing it without a second thought for where anybody else ranked on the list. This serves both as self-flattery and trolling of his enemies.
If you spend more than an instant looking at the chart, aside from the bad rankings and some of the terrible pictures (Millard Fillmore did not have a big, brown moptop when he was president), what ought to leap off the page is that there are only 34 presidents pictured, while 45 men have held the office (two of them, Trump and Grover Cleveland, having done so twice). Conspicuously omitted are Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush — every Republican president since 1932 except for Trump.
There’s a reason for that. Sharp-eyed internet sleuths noticed that the chart largely reproduces a “survey” of 55 academics conducted for the November 1, 1948, issue of Life magazine (an issue dated the day before the presidential election) by Arthur Schlesinger.
That also explains the absence of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, although whoever turned the Schlesinger chart into a Trump meme threw in three contemporary Democrats to fill out the “Failures” tier (Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Jimmy Carter), and added — either out of respect or for a sheen of fairness — Bill Clinton to the “Average” tier.
There are, as I explained in 2024, serious methodological problems with producing presidential rankings by the consensus of a select group of academics, most glaringly the effort to produce a purportedly nonpartisan, nonideological output that very obviously includes ideological and partisan biases in its inputs. (This is why I’ve done my own ranking by separating the presidents by party.) Schlesinger and his selected panelists putting FDR second only to Washington and Lincoln during the 1948 presidential campaign was done in the same spirit, for many of the same purposes, as Trump fans putting him first in 2026. Roosevelt had only been out of office for three years, and Democrats in 1948 were wrapping their campaign themes in the need to keep FDR’s coalition together.
As Schlesinger explained:
It is in the administrations directed by these men that we can find a common pattern. . . . All of them, moreover took the side of progressivism and reform as understood in their day. . . . Strong leaders arouse strong opposition. Business interests resist anything new in the way of controls; politicians usually prefer to let well enough alone; Congress resents executive “encroachments”; the opposition party views everything with alarm.
The rest of the rankings are illustrative of the midcentury liberal mind. The hateful Woodrow Wilson, seen as a mentor and pathfinder by FDR and his men, is rated among the greats. U.S. Grant and Warren Harding, both excellent presidents but plainspoken Midwesterners culturally out of step with the academy, are trashed as “failures,” and Calvin Coolidge “below average.” Schlesinger and his cronies used the corruption of their cabinets as an excuse to place Grant and Harding below James Buchanan, who literally left the country in a state of imminent civil war. That’s an abdication of the historian’s duty to measure what matters most (policy) — in contrast to the treatment of Wilson, whose progressive policy stances were treated as more important than, say, racially segregating the entire federal government. They ranked Andrew Johnson, a dogged foe of black equal rights, above Coolidge.
The hegemony of midcentury liberal consensus, of the sort that National Review was founded to rail against, ought to be dead by now. But Trump can’t help himself: if it flatters him and annoys his enemies, he’ll embrace anything.