Any views or opinions expressed in this column are of the individual, group, or entity who submitted it and not the publication, owner(s), its advertisers, or affiliates.
Every election cycle someone declares the current guy the worst president in history.
That’s a reflex, not analysis. So let’s do this properly looking at the last twenty-five years.
The field is George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden – four men, four very different disasters, and one clear winner for worst.
Bush gets the Iraq penalty. He took the USA, still reeling from 9/11, sold the public on weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there, and launched a war that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives. The mission creep was real. The “mission accomplished” banner was a punchline.
But Bush also passed No Child Left Behind, which at least tried to fix schools, and PEPFAR, which saved millions of lives in Africa from AIDS. He left office with a collapsed economy, sure, but the man could read a room, and he wasn’t actively trying to burn the furniture.
Obama gets the drone penalty and the “hope and change” hangover. He expanded executive power in ways that made civil libertarians twitch. The Iran deal was a gamble that aged poorly.
But Obama also passed the Affordable Care Act, which, love it or hate it, gave coverage to millions who didn’t have it. He didn’t start any new wars. He ended the one in Iraq. He was competent, which in this era is almost a superpower.
Then there’s Biden. Inflation hit forty-year highs on his watch. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a logistical and human disaster – thirteen Americans dead, equipment left behind, allies watching in horror.
His cognitive decline became impossible to ignore, and his own party had to push him out. He governed like a man reading from a script written by his worst instincts, and the script was legible but the delivery was shaky.
But the worst?
Donald Trump. Not because he’s the most scandalous – he’s not. Not because he’s the most corrupt – the bar is low and he clears it with room to spare. Because he took a functioning system and treated it like a suggestion box, and he did it with a grin.
Trump inherited a booming economy, low unemployment, no new wars, and a political system that, for all its flaws, still worked. He traded it for chaos. The pandemic response lurched from denial to panic. He called COVID a hoax, then a war, then a hoax again. The economy that was strong before the virus got wrecked by it, and he took credit for the recovery he didn’t cause.
But the thing that puts him at the bottom isn’t the pandemic. It’s January 6th. He lied about an election he lost, told his supporters the system was rigged, and when the lie didn’t work, he sent a mob to the Capitol to take it by force. Thirteen people died.
The peaceful transfer of power, the thing that makes America not a banana republic, got a stress test it shouldn’t have needed. He treated democratic norms like a suggestion box. He treated the Justice Department like his personal law firm. He treated the military like a prop for his rallies. He treated the truth like a buffet – take what you like, leave the rest.
Now, you might say this is unfair. Trump did pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which cut taxes for corporations and high-end earners. He brokered the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, while starting a hot war with Iran over shipping lanes. All true. But the worst president isn’t the one who did nothing. It’s the one who had the most to work with and squandered it on the biggest scale.
Trump had the booming economy, the country at peace, the political system that still worked – and he traded it for a cult of personality that treated elections as optional and institutions as obstacles. That’s not a bad presidency. That’s a tragedy with a body count.
The others failed in smaller ways. Bush failed in a war. Obama failed in a hangover. Biden failed in a decline. Trump failed in a way that reshaped the country for a generation, and not for the better.
So there it is. The worst president of the last twenty-five years is Donald Trump – not because he was the most evil, but because he was the most gifted at breaking things, and because he used his gifts to break something sacred in America that was well on the way to being fixed
Bill Gindlesperger is a central Pennsylvanian, Dickinson College graduate, Pennsylvania System Of Higher Education (PASSHE) Governor, former Shippensburg University Trustee, awarded numerous patents, as well as Founder and Chairman of eLynxx Solutions. eLynxx provides cloud-software for automated sourcing and managing of mail marketing, swag, packaging, and all things print. He is a board member, campaign advisor, successful entrepreneur, published author and commentator. He can be reached at Bill@eLynxx.com
