Um … … oops! 
Ah, I stand corrected. Well, at least he wasn’t a traitor to the United States while serving as president, unlike Davis. (And yes, I understand that Davis’s presidency was for a different polity.)
I always thought it was pretty obvious, given the times, that Garner was moderating his language for his audience, or those who quoted him were moderating his language for theirs.
So there are three aspects of what makes “worst”, and I have zero problem saying Trump is hands down the worst:
- What was their political philosophy? Were the things there were attempting to achieve with political power, regardless of what happened in practice, good or bad. I mean its hard to see what Trump’s political philosophy is beyond “Make Donald J Trump powerful, rich and venerated”, which is bad in itself. But the odd bits of something resembling political philosophy that do appear basically boil down to authoritarianism, racism, and cruelty, which is worse.
- How effective were they at being president. Did they hire the right people and effectively manage the responsibilities and powers of the presidency. Absolutely hands-down the worst. Like if you wrote a fictional bad president doing the things Trump did, your editor would be ask you to tone it down as it was not believable.
- Then there are the things they did during their presidency, what policies did they champion and implement, how did they react to the events of their presidency? The complication here is the president does not operate in a vacuum. Sure Trump didn’t send thousands of Cherokee men women and children on a death march. He didn’t prolong the institution of chattel slavery. He didn’t sabotage reconstruction and bring about the Jim Crow south. But a 21st Century president doesn’t get to do those things, but you can bet he would have done those things if the chance came up and the things he did (the muslim ban, killing Soleimani, utterly screwing up Covid response for political reasons, not to mention leading a goddamn insurrection to overturn a legal election result and become a dictator!) were plenty awful.
I’d like to add this … because I didn’t see it upthread via a keyword search and I think it adds value to the thread:
Official Results of the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey – 12pp PDF
Spoiler alert: Trump doesn’t come out looking so good in this one 
I think there’s a good case for Trump being a traitor twice over. In addition to his attempt to overthrow the government, he appears to be placing Russian interests ahead of American interests in exchange for money and other favors.
Trump is a traitor thrice over if you include Saudi Arabia, $2 billion client of Jared Kushner. Though arguably influence peddling belongs in a separate category.
I think the worse part was that he didn’t do it for political reasons. Screwing up on a major national emergency actually hurt Trump politically. His reasons for doing it were laziness, arrogance, stupidity, and incompetence.
When Trump was first briefed about the imminent Covid crisis, he apparently responded with a combination of laziness and arrogance. He didn’t want to make any effort and he figured he knew better than the experts, so he decided there was no crisis. And having decided that, he refused to admit he was wrong. When the number of deaths grew too large for him to pretend the problem didn’t exist, he just shifted and denied the reality of the problem. And his followers just agreed with whatever their leader told them.
True. But I think political as well. He didn’t want to be the president that had a major pandemic on his hands. And like the idiot he is, thought if he ignored it would go away.
Remember him saying “We are testing for COVID too much. That’s why we have so many cases” 
Actually Trump did want to be the president that had a major pandemic on his hands. He was just too dumb to know it.
People rally to their leader in a major crisis like a war or a terrorist attack - or a pandemic. If Trump had had an ounce of political sense, he would have realized he could use Covid to his own advantage. All he would have had to do was go on camera, repeat what the experts had told him, claim he was “leading”, and take credit for work being done by other people. He probably would have won a second term - maybe even legitimately.
Very good point Nemo.
I mean its clearly true it absolutely hurt him in the end. He had set the bar so low all he needed to do was the absolute minimum that was required by a regular president (follow the plan the CDC had in place, turn up on TV occasionally and read a speech written for you, full of platitudes about sticking together and getting through this as Americans) and he would have be lauded in the press as having his “presidential moment” and strolled to victory in 2022.
But its also really hard to separate Trump’s laziness, arrogance, stupidity, and incompetence.from his political program. I mean its kind of all he has, there is no wider political program other than a general love of authoritarianism, racism, and cruelty. Regardless though his administration (and the wider GOP machine) took that an ran with it. People who were smart enough to realize it would absolutely kill 100s of thousands of their own supporters, politicized Covid as it would help them politically. Prior to that the anti-vax movement was, if anything, more left leaning than right, they consciously changed that and it killed thousands, and continues to kill people.
Yeah totally. And more importantly he’d set the bar so incredibly low, that he really wouldn’t have had to do much for the mainstream media to absolutely eat it up. Just do what, for any other president, would be the absolutely bare minimum. The CDC had a plan in place, since at least SARS, that was a good one. He just needed to follow that (taking credit for it himself natch’) and occasionally trot out some platitudes written by his speech writer, and boom he’s having his “presidential moment”. He’d have walked to victory in 2020.
Sort of. He just did the classic thing of finding an “expert” who was saying what he wanted to hear. And ignored the actual experts in the room.
If you recall, he said we’d be down to zero cases before May 2020. It turned out a lot of those “projections” were based on the work of one Kevin Hassett (of Dow 36000 infamy), who, as it happens, used population models (and economic models, actually) that were almost certainly cubic polynomial regressions performed in MS Excel. When those showed negative projected detected cases, he just rounded new cases to zero. And here it is 4 years later, and we still have several new cases daily.
And then he put Jared Kushner in charge of the White House response team. And Kushner figured, incorrectly and in line with his past behavior, he was smarter than the actual medical experts. His team thought this would be a ‘blue state’ epidemic, limited to NY and the West Coast, because naturally, detection of outbreaks of disease tend to be correlated with major population centers. And that it would burn out without spreading. And that would be good in an election year by hurting blue states without hitting any red states. So they didn’t think they needed to do anything but show up on camera and look Presidential and the problem would take care of itself. But viruses don’t care about arbitrary state boundaries and our initial response was beyond inept.
So, cronyism, incompetence, nepotism, laziness, and just poor all around leadership in one package.
Which are pretty much the hallmarks of a bad President.
He could have been a President that had a major pandemic on his hands – something he can’t be blamed for, not even him – but mustered the resources for beating it early. He would have won the 2020 election in a walk.
It was like he was checking off boxes in a list.
Didn’t kushner also actually purchase masks and other safety supplies and claim it was for “them” or something like that? I sort of recall being pissed about that.
This is going to sound a bit holier-than-thou, but…
I choose Trump. He won the presidential election. What gives you all the right to take the genie’s offer? You are choosing to overturn the 2024 election. What makes you different than those folks on January 6?
~Max
I think you are getting too hung up on the framing device for this fanciful hypothetical. If it helps assuage your guilty conscience, let’s pretend that the genie is merely offering to transport a copy of you into an alternate universe where one of the people in the poll has been legitimately elected president. In the original universe, everything will stay just the way it was.
The problem here is that Trump self-identifies as a “businessman”, and ties all his self-worth into how rich he is. As president, this transmuted into “How well is the economy doing?” He didn’t want to make a serious effort to deal with a pandemic because he knew that any pandemic response would negatively impact the economy. Even without things like formal shut-downs, lots of people would voluntarily limit their activities, and even a small drop in things like going out to dinner, going to the movies, or going on vacation would cause a major economic slump. Some businesses would close (at least temporarily) because of this, and all those employees being laid off would exacerbate these trends.
Trump wanted to avoid all that, and he thought that if he just didn’t acknowledge the actual problem, he’d avoid the actual consequences.