Hey, if he can avoid the Reaper he will probably have a damn good try at filling those ‘top’ five. We all know he wants to.
It’s a matter of balance, as well as the time’s he lived in. Nixon did a lot of good things to help balance out the bad that he did. Nixon did more for the environment than any other POTUS. I’ve discussed the point on several threads on this board, and the usual response is something like “yes, that’s probably true, but the reason he did those things was for his own selfish purposes, not because he actually cared about the environment”. None the less, I challenge you all to point out a POTUS that did more for the environment. Teddy Roosevelt might be a close second, but even in his case I think it’s safe to say Nixon did more. He created the EPA, NOAA, signed the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act including starting us on the path to eliminating leaded gas. In addition to his achievements WRT the environment, he also normalized relations with China, another huge achievement. As the saying goes, “only Nixon could go to China”.
WRT to his misdeeds, in some sense he also benefitted from the times he lived in.
Nixon had the benefit of living in a time where that was still a commandment that applied to Republicans. Maybe he would have done more damage in the current climate, where a Republican POTUS can do evil shit out in the open and not just get away with it but be cheered on by his base. But he didn’t live in such a time, and thus his opportunity for evil doing was limited.
Right. And in the process he gave the middle finger to SCOTUS when they ordered him to treat the Cherokee as a nation equal to any other nation, ignoring their ruling and proceeding with a genocide against people he believed should be treated as inferiors rather than a nation equal to his own. In a way we were lucky that his precedent setting ignoring of a SCOTUS ruling was not used again by any other presidents until our current one. This aspect of what he did wrong is an also a part of why Jackson is a cut above (below?) guys like Van Buren.
Agreed on that. Even though this is a list about presidenting (is that a word? 
) rather how good or bad a person one was, I think it’s fair to say that Carter was the best human being among our presidents. That alone should keep him from coming anywhere near the bottom 5.
I am 100% on board with this. Nixon was a bad guy, and not a good President. He was similar to Trump in paranoia levels. But look, he actually did try to govern, he got some useful things done, he fostered detente with China.
More than anything, when he got caught out covering up a third-rate burglary to get elected, he submitted to the democratic process and stepped down. This is no particular honor, quite the opposite, but to me it means he can’t be on the top 5 list.
As to the rest of the list, a challenge for me is separating the unique awfulness of the man himself from the climate of enablement that helped him be so bad. The presidency of George W. Bush was a nightmare, but this is less because the man wanted and intended to be bad, and more by virtue of the fact that the Republican party had become utterly insane, vicious, and avaricious. His chief error was in being weak and allowing himself to be their instrument. Nonetheless, I have to put his actual Presidency in the 5 worst simply because of the incompetence and lawlessness that he channeled.
So the rubric for me then becomes fecklessness and lawlessness, plus the specific factor of contributing to civil war, national schism, or overthrow of the constitutional order. While Presidents can misconduct themselves in multitude ways, actually breaking the entire country has to take precedence over being a really shitty and damaging guy. That’s why I can’t put Reagan, Harding, or Coolidge in the bottom 5.
So I end up with:
Fifth: Andrew Jackson - utter contempt for the law, depraved racism, incompetence. An inspiration for Trump. As bad as the Civil War was, imagine how Jackson would’ve handled it.
Fourth: George W. Bush - an incompetent but willing tool of criminal lunatics. The Bush years were the last opportunity for a Republican to guide his party to reverse course and start repairing national divisions, but his soft incompetence helped split the country while paving the way for the eventual Republican coup. Plus I will go to my grave wanting to slap that stupid smirk off his face.
Third: Andrew Johnson - disastrous incompetence that arguably, rhetorically, helped reverse the outcome of the Civil War.
Second: James Buchanan - feckless indifference in the face of the Civil War.
First: You already know.
This is an incredibly charitable take on W, and I would argue inaccurate:
· During the 2000 primary in South Carolina, the Bush campaign used push polling to spread the rumors that McCain had an illegitimate black child (one of the McCain’s adopted children is Bangladeshi) and that Cindy McCain is a drug addict.
· During the 2000 election, Bush came to power via undemocratic methods when the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount, as part of the Bush campaign’s strategy in Florida, they mobilized the Brooks Brothers Rioters to disrupt the recount process, many historians see them as a precursor to the Jan 6 insurrectionists.
· After the 9/11 attacks, the world rallied around the US and NATO triggered its mutual defense doctrine for the first time to support American action in Afghanistan. Bush almost immediately pivoted to the invasion of Iraq, dismissing the concerns of our allies and undermining NATO.
· When Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a slain American soldier camped out in front of Bush’s vacation home and asked for a meeting, he refused to meet with her.
· The invasion of Iraq destabilized the middle east, undermined reformists voices in the Arab world who were now seen as tools of American colonialism. It also pushed Turkey farther towards extremism and hastened the end of America’s global standing.
In short, W was a proto Trump: he undermined our ties to Europe, was casually cruel and willing to use racism and non-democratic means to seize power. He was also casually dismissive of the suffering of the families of fallen soldiers. I would argue that without him we would not have Trump.
Yes, and I believe he lost the 2000 election. I believe having Gore win in 2000, which he basically did, would have had us avoid Trump. However, would we have had Obama? I bet we would have, just delayed possibly after 2009.
I don’t think W. and Trump are all that close. I think W was atrocious, but I really have no words for how wicked and corrupt Trump is. Preaching to the choir here, but Trump really is many times worse than any other president.
The things you mention are largely things done by “the Bush campaign” or “the Bush administration,” so I don’t think they do a good job of refuting @Hari_Seldon’s claim that Bush himself was “basically a decent man, not very bright, too heavily influenced by his VEEP and cabinet.”
I suspect that Bush would have been a significantly better president if he had had different, better people around him.
On the other hand, a big part of the President’s job is knowing whom to listen to, whom to be influenced by, and whom to delegate to. How they handle that goes a long way toward determining how good or bad of a president they are.
This is the good tsar, bad boyars argument that Trumpists often employ and is another similarity with Trump’s reign of error.
Medicare and Medicaid were both created under Johnson, and of the two, Medicaid is much more reviled.
Missed the edit, but even if you subscribe to the belief that W was unaware of everything, all of which were things he was publicly asked about; even if you think joking about not finding WMDs in Iraq at a WH Correspondents dinner after thousands of deaths is hilarious; he still was an astoundingly incompetent president. This list is the worst presidents, not the most evil.
Nixon tried, and obviously failed, to implement universal healthcare. He obviously doesn’t get points for that since he failed, but had he succeeded, we probably wouldn’t have had the debacles (from the standpoint of sidetracking and keeping other things from getting done) of Hillarycare and Obamacare / the 1994 and 2010 red waves.
But I’d argue that is why he’s such a bad president. That is pretty much top of the list of characteristics you don’t want in a head of state.
I disagree purely because of the Iraq invasion. It’s a uniquely heinous thing, that we are still dealing with the repercussions of, and it is entirely the fault of Dubya (unlike the Vietnam war the blame for which can be spread over the administrations of JFK, LBJ, and Nixon).
No one thing Trump has yet* done has been as bad for the world or America as the Iraq invasion. That puts Dubya in the same ball park as Trump, even if I think Trump still has him beat overall.
‘*’ - it’s possible Trump’s abandonment of NATO will end up having worst repercussions, and there’s still three years left (and a blatant war of aggression in Venezuela) for Trump to do worse things 
Agree and let’s not forget the botched Katrina response and all the warning signs he missed about the 9/11 attack. The fact that letting 9/11 happen is number three on his list of blunders is telling.
And that’s a fair take, and one I’m inclined to agree with. I was pushing back against @madmonk28’s claim, which was that that description was inaccurate.
I’d argue that you can’t be a good person and joke about causing thousands of deaths
Yup also telling is the fact that all those other terrible things combined (which were definitely terrible) still doesn’t get him close to Trump.
Like I said, he was a proto Trump, a gateway idiot, who was overtly hostile to intellectuals and experts and wasn’t terribly interested in governing. And I just remembered the financial crisis that almost brought a second Great Depression. I think he might edge Trump out for the number one spot.
That was his fatal flaw, though. When every other country was withdrawing all its diplomats, ending tourist and journalist visas, and otherwise clearing out their embassies of all personell, even while the Iranians were swearing it was not necessary, and they would never violate the sanctity of an embassy, Carter alone decided to make a show of faith by leaving a sort of skeleton crew at the US embassy, which remained open.
It backfired.
I disagree. Trump has taken the US from the most admired country in the world with allies all over the world to the most reviled with no allies at all. he has created a condition of distrust that can be nearly impossible to overcome since countries have realized that it takes only one election to destroy any agreement the US makes.
Incidentally, one reason for this is that for decades the senate has refused to ratify treaties. They think–not incorrectly–that treaty ratification is a loss of sovereignty since ratified treaties become part of the supreme law of the land. A treaty merely signed by the president can be undone by a future president and doesn’t commit the country to keeping its word. And Trump has demonstrated this as clearly as possible. In the future, any agreement with the US will be regarded as temporary and basically meaningless. This may be the worst damage Trump has done.