What was your version of Donald Trump? (not necessarily behavior-wise, but just badness)
For German Dopers, it would be Hitler, of course. What about others?
For South Africa, you have to decide if you mean all-time - in which case it’s HF Verwoerd - or only in democratic SA. In which case, Jacob Zuma.
According to right-wing Canadians, it’s any prime minister named “Trudeau”. Personally I can’t think of anyone cartoonishly bad, although arguably some of the policies under John A. Macdonald’s administration caused a lot of harm.
For Australians there are more than a few ineffective prime ministers, none were a real disaster to national interests, chiefly because if they go off the rails there are several mechanisms to truncate their premiership.
General consensus would give that gong to Billie McMahon (1971-72) with the award for worst in the current century a toss-up between Tony Abbott (2013-15) and Scott Morrison (2018-22). All of whom are Liberal PMs.
Gough Whitlam (1972-75) was a textbook example reform trumping management as Noel Pearson’s oration said. His Labor government was a rabble. Gough was patrician but his legacy, still clearly visible in the rear vision mirror of history was magnificent.
Yes, sure, but there would have been no Hitler without Kaiser Wilhelm II.
And Spain? Jeez… Franco was bad. Aznar, in recent memory, was horrible. The King Charles the fifth of Germany and the first of Spain was catastrophic. Charles II was so retarded that he was nicknamed el Hechizado (the bewitched, the one under a spell).
The answer would be shorter (but not easier) if you asked the opposite: who was your nation’s best leader?
So, if you want to relativize the dumbness and the damage the current leader of your country is inflicting on your country and the world, there were many at his level of stupid and clueless in the past. Enough to make you wonder what a dumb species we are. But he has more powerful tools at his disposal. He stands on the shoulders of … huh … others. Many others.
Scotland/the UK have a long list of leaders, few enough of whom displayed much competence.
There’s also the question of worst as in inept, simply couldn’t do the job of leadership; or worst as in left the country in a far worse position than they found it, which is sometimes due to ineptitude and sometimes achieved by successfully driving through a series of misguided or plain evil policies.
Worst leaders pre-democracy:
William the Lyon, David I (started pointless and expensive wars with England, promptly got captured in battle rather than having the decency to get killed, thus incurring a crippling ransom and handing England immense diplomatic leverage)
Every single ruler between James I and V, whose rule all followed the same pattern: be crowned King as child, leaving nation and their person to be fought over by scheming nobles, come of age to take more or less bloody revenge; do a more or less adequate job of stabilising their rule and starting to turn things round; die, usually by getting killed by doing something fucking stupid they’d been told not to do; leave as heir a child, who would be crowned and have their power and person fought over by scheming nobles, before coming of age and taking revenge…
That stupid deaths list in full:
James I - knifed to death in a sewer by pissed off nobles. When he came to the end of the sewer/escape route and found it blocked, he must have remembered that it had been grated up on the orders of him personally because he kept losing tennis balls down it.
James II - was told explicitly: “Don’t stand next to that new cannon you’re so proud of, it’s new tech and might blow up killing you.” Stood next to it. It blew up. Killing him.
James III - died in murky circumstances following a battle with rebel nobles he’d pissed off by high-handed vacillation, including his son who he’d been maneouvering to disinherit. Possibly stabbed to death by the priest taking his confession.
James IV - the best of the bunch, brought the Renaissance to Scotland, boosted trade and prosperity, made a peace with England - then threw it away to honour an old promise to France by invading England when England invaded France. Got killed charging downhill into a more or less peasant army who had little better than billhooks against his new-fangled pikes - great weapons, really hard to wield effectively when charging downhill. Lost everything he’d built up, along with his life.
James V - got sick and died. Ill-timed but not that dumb. But did leave arguable the worst Scottish ruler, Mary Queen of Scots.
At one point she had a claim on the thrones of Scotland, England and France and coming to the throne at the same time Elizabeth I was demonstrating that a young woman could hold and use power to great effect, blew it all up through a series of catastrophic marriages, inflexibility and high-handedness, leading to her imprisonment, exile and death at the hands of her cousin.
In the modern democratic era, we have a rich assortment of bad leaders from the flagrantly corrupt Lloyd George, to the sadly overwhelmed Ramsay MacDonald and the frankly disengaged Lord Hume.
Under ineptness we have to look at Truss, Johnson, May, Brown, Eden. Under competent but ill-intentioned we have Thatcher first and foremost.
But in the Venn diagram of competent and yet inept, we have one name: David Cameron.
He very competently instituted a massive programme of public service cuts which have holowed out state capacity in the fields of justice, education, social care, infrastructure investment and local government, leaving the country in a visibly worse state than he found it. He also incompetently called and lost the Brexit referendum, teh results of which are still visible in terms of economic decline, loss of diplomatic influence and most pertinently right now a huge increase in anti-immigrant sentiment and the rise of far-right politics under Farage et al.
I agree, although Liz Truss takes the prize for “most damage done per day in office”.
I don’t consider myself right-wing, but I am a Canadian. Pierre Trudeau was a lawyer, and economist, and a statesman, who made a few errors (his “6 and 5” program), but he did manage to cement Canada’s place as a middle power whose views deserved listening to at international summits and at the United Nations.
I’d call Justin Trudeau bad, though not cartoonishly bad. He, and his supporters, really had no idea what they were getting Justin into. Justin considered it a major success when he successfully banned plastic bags from supermarkets and got rid of plastic straws from fast-food joints, and made the weather service’s name changed to “Environment and Climate Change Canada.” But those were all cosmetic changes, that made no difference in the long run. His cabinet ministers made sure that Canada continued as a middle power on the international stage without him screwing things up too much.
If I had to select one of Canada’s Prime Ministers, it would be R.B. Bennett.(in office 1930-1935). Yep, that was the Depression, and Bennett and his Government were not prepared, and did not know what to do. Still, he had a couple of successes, in establishing the CRBC and the Bank of Canada, but he could not enact anything that could pull Canada out of the Depression.
ETA too late: It could be argued that Bennett gave rise to William “Bible Bill” Eberhart, (in office 1935-1943), premier of Alberta, who thought he could print Alberta’s own currency in an effort to combat the Depression. It was based on the Canadian dollar, and it was a complicated plan, but Eberhart tried.
No, he couldn’t, said the courts.
Probably Alberta’s worst leader, if we can count political subunits of Canada, though currently, Danielle Smith is giving Bible Bill a run for his money.
Ninja’d on those nominations, but a dishonourable mention goes to Howard, also a ‘Liberal’ (which was our centre-right party, despite the name).
The current one.
First one I thought of when I read that. If (and there cannot be any doubt) Hitler was our worst leader, WIlli II was the second worst. Very similar personality as Trump btw., narcissistic, ego-driven, vindictive, incorrigible, pompous and an idiot with Dunning Kruger complex to boot.
ETA: notable third place: Hindenburg, who had already played an infamous role in WW II and its aftermath as commander-in-chief, and who as Reichspräsident paved the way for the nazis taking over.
Sorry, too late to edit: WW I of course.
Who did? Not Roosevelt. I was born in 1937 and my parents said that was one of the worst years. Roosevelt did enact policies that helped take the edge off, but, regrettably, the depression didn’t end until the war.
Zimbabwe got Robert Mugabe, a man to whom the clutches of power (and widely rumored syphilis) drove him to increasing erratic behaviour. He was definity senile though most of the 1990s, though he started rule in the early ''80s with the inspired idea to unite the nation by commiting genocide on the smaller isiNdebele tribe, because they supported his biggest rival.
Oh, he was directly responsible for the second highest inflation rate in history, 89.7 sextillion% (10^{21}). What a guy.
Now we have Emmerson Mnangagwa, a man who is determined to be even worse than Mugabe, but he is more subtle, more intelligent and more dangerous.
That’s interesting that Mary QoS has such a tarnished reputation, given how Scots refuse to acknowledge the existence of Elisabeth I for ordering her execution.
Forgive me, I am an engineer, not an historian, but as I recall from history courses I took because I enjoyed learning, was he the guy who spoke one complete sentence, “I am the Emperor, and I want noodles”?
No, that was Ferdinand I of Austria. And, for this question, Austria has the same answer as Germany.
Argentina: the current one.