We’ve got a lot of threads and a lot of talk expressing peoples’ horror and disbelief over Mr. Trump’s upcoming presidency. I’m not happy either, believe me, but it’s done. So… can we possibly find a bright side and look back on rulers who a lot of people hated and / or feared; who were controversial, yet whose rule didn’t end in catastrophe or maybe even ended positively? My first thought is FDR and then maybe JFK. I’m no historian so I think the fervor today is not exactly the same, but that’s why I’m asking. Can we look back and see that sometimes the doom and gloom turns out well?
Italy survived both Berlusconi and Mussolini, albeit at some cost. Which one Trump will most closely resemble is unknowable. Yet.
Agree with the above - I think Trump is most like Berlusconi. And he doesn’t even need to get any worse to be disastrous - Berlusconi was bad enough, but imagine if he presided over a vastly more influential and powerful country (sorry, Italia).
Winston Churchill had a track record of huge mistakes and misjudgements. He worked out okay. They still dumped him the first chance they had after the war.
Well, so far this is grim. Surely we, or another nation, have been in this position before. Has there never been a happy ending?
We got through Richard Nixon mostly okay. He said some remarkably stupid things.
I don’t think the JFK presidency ended positively, but YMMV.
Nixon weakened the presidency and helped establish the idea that the government was not to be trusted. It may be debatable whether those are good things or not, but distrust of the government has now become pathological in some quarters. I think Trump will inevitably make this even worse.
“We will bury you” by Khruschev
How quickly we forget this guy…
I suppose we survived his reign, if only just.
You know who else was a widely unpopular world leader who said crazy ass things? Only things didn’t work out so well for him!!
Bush seems almost intelligent and presidential, in retrospect.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wasn’t that popular within Iran or outside of Iran. He was also well known for making bizarre statements. I think that the Iranian government set up limited the damage that he could ultimately do.
Note: I am not an expert in this area.
I thought of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was prone to making provocative/insulting statements and getting into trouble as a result.
After an uproar over one of his typical indiscretions, a diplomat sadly said “The other sovereigns are so much quieter”. 
The recent Venezuelan Presidents, Chávez and Maduro, are real doozies and comparable in several ways to Trump.
While Chávez was popular in the beginning, his support went away by the end. Maduro didn’t even start off popular. Rigged elections are a wonderful thing, aren’t they?
You misspelled “destroyed 150 years of inherent respect for the office.” Which, in the longest run, will probably be seen as the first domino leading to Trump.
And that’s really it - we’ve had good Presidents and bad, of Our party and The Other Guys, but pretty much all of them have been reasonably qualified, experienced and… “Presidential.” Not a one comes to mind who didn’t have a clue what the job entailed or needed or demanded. This time is *different *in so many respects it’s boggling.
But it seems to be a global thing. The rise of extreme, frankly crazy-ass leaders like Berlusconi and Chavez and Duterte and Putin is… disturbing. I think we’re about to be reminded that progress is never continuous.
I am a huge critic of Dubya, but I am so stealing this line.
I don’t know… there were some of those 19th century presidents who, if not as unqualified on paper, were certainly unprepared for the Presidency and did poor jobs.
Plus there was Harding. Trump has some stiff competition before he gets to “worst President ever”.
John Oliver likes to remind us that the Philippines have a pretty wacky president. He’s still the president though so no word on how it “went” just how it’s going.