Historical Perspective

The 2024 Presidential election is in the books and it’s time to take stock. I’ll let the political science people analyze the results, but one number jumped out at me. Trump won an election for the first time in his life with slightly more votes than he received in 2020. The big difference was that Kamala Harris received about 9 million fewer votes than Joe Biden had in 2020. Again, other people are more equipped than I to comb through these results and explain them, but, as a historian, I can offer some thoughts about the presidency in a general sense.

Every few years, someone conducts a poll among historians and other scholars, asking them to rank the presidents from best to worst. The sort of criteria used by these polls usually include various questions, but they fall into three main categories. (1) How did the president do in terms of foreign policy? (Did they keep us out of unnecessary wars, strengthen our status in the world, make us stronger militarily, etc.?) (2) How did he do with domestic affairs? (Did the economy improve or decline?;  How did he handle the rights of minority groups?; Did he rule on behalf of all people, not just the wealthy,?; Were there political scandals or corruption connected with his administration)? (3) And finally, if faced with a crisis, how successful was he in resolving the situation?

Because of the assortment of people polled and criteria used, the results have varied over time, but certain patterns emerge from these polls. The top three presidents in these polls are invariably the same: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George Washington.

Washington ranks highly because of his steady guidance and restraint through the process of establishing exactly what a president’s role would be within the brand-new, checks-and-balances system of a democratic government. Most important of all, he set the incredible precedent of willingly stepping down from the presidency and conducting a peaceful transfer of power to the next president. This may not sound like much, but it had never happened before in modern history. Before Washington, most national leaders in the world had been kings, absolute monarchs, or military leaders who were loathe to even share power, let alone surrender it. George’s amazing act set an example that was followed in the US until 2020 and was copied by many other nations.

FDR makes these lists because he guided the nation through our two greatest crises of the 20^th Century, the Great Depression and World War II. In the process, he did several things that helped elevate the country to world dominance and greatness. First, he legalized labor unions, thus allowing millions of workers to improve themselves economically and even join the middle class. Also, he passed the Social Security Act, called by many the single most important piece of legislation in US history. The SSA provided security for millions of people who had previously lived on the dangerous edge of poverty. Finally, he laid the groundwork for an alliance system that provided national security for the US and numerous other countries across the globe for decades. Before his international leadership, the US had floundered on the periphery of the world’s stage and pursued a policy of isolation, assuming that we could go it alone, without getting involved with other nations, especially in Europe. It was this myopic stance by the isolationists that allowed Adolf Hitler to take over one country after another in Europe until he was almost too powerful to stop. FDR elevated the US to a position of leadership that we have never fully relinquished since the 1940s.

Lincoln stands at the top, poll after poll, for obvious reasons: he ended the odious institution of slavery and held our nation together at its most critical moment, the Civil War. I could write pages more about the greatness of Lincoln, but this will suffice for now.

Toward the bottom of these polls, you will find the usual suspects. Those connected with massive corruption, such as Warren G. Harding, Ulysses S. Grant, and Richard Nixon (although Nixon’s reputation has improved in recent polls), show up repeatedly. Also, those who demonstrated utter incompetence in the face of a crisis show up here. This would include Herbert Hoover (The Depression), Andrew Johnson (Reconstruction), and especially James Buchanan. I just read Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, which is about the start of the Civil War, and Buchanan, with the nation at a critical breaking point, repeatedly tried to appease the slave-holding states or pass responsibility off to the next president.

All of this is preamble to an attempt to speculate where our last two presidents will fall in these polls. I should preface these remarks by saying that historians never like to discuss current events. We are trained to delay analysis for at least several decades to allow the passage of time to cool partisan passions and, hopefully, create a more objective viewpoint. That said, this is my attempt to guess what historians will say about the recent presidents fifty years from now.

Biden will be complicated. A good comparison might be Harry S Truman. FDR died in April, 1945 and his VP, Truman, took over during one of the most difficult moments in the nation’s history. It fell to Truman to end the war against Germany, defeat Japan, rebuild the economy after the war, and develop an alliance system to oppose an aggressive Russia. After the war, millions of former soldiers returned home, expecting to find jobs, buy homes, and start families. However, at that very moment, factories that had been supplying tanks, airplanes, machine guns, uniforms, and other things for the military, suddenly shut down in order to convert to making civilian goods such as appliances, clothing, and automobiles. Unemployment was rampant, and the grumbling began. Further, because of shortages of consumer goods, prices shot up as people were willing to pay higher prices for almost everything. Economists predicted a return of the Depression that had ended with the start of the build-up for war. So, although none of this was the fault of the President, Truman got blamed for the lack of jobs and the high inflation. His approval ratings plummeted, hitting a low of 22%. He was regarded as a bumbling bureaucrat who was in over his head as President. His campaign song for his re-election was “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” but detractors, noting the lack of enthusiasm for the Democrat, altered it to “I’m Just Mild About Harry.” Despite all of that, he managed to win re-election in a close vote. Still, his 2^nd-term approval rating remained mired in the twenties and low thirties. Historians, too, ranked him among the weakest presidents of all time.

Then, twenty years later, something remarkable occurred. In the early ‘70s, in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate, his reputation enjoyed a resurgence. After dealing with Nixon, people suddenly looked at Truman as an honest, decent man who spoke frankly, rebuilt our peacetime economy, and started the nation on a quarter century of world-wide economic dominance. Moreover, he stood up to the aggressive Russians, who were trying to take over all of Europe, and limited their expansion. About the time of his death in 1972, his popularity soared. There was a one-man show on Broadway called “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry.” That play was made into a movie, and a best-selling book titled, Plain Speaking detailed his life and career through his speeches and quotes. His ranking in those presidential polls began to climb as well, and the most recent one I saw had him ranked as the 6^th best president of all time, just behind the Big Three, Thomas Jefferson, and Teddy Roosevelt.

I am suggesting that, fifty years from now, Joe Biden’s presidency will be looked at in a similar fashion. He took office during another critical period in our nation’s history. Like all Democratic presidents over the past 40 years (Clinton, Obama, and Biden), he inherited an economy from his Republican predecessor (Bush, Sr., Bush, Jr., and Trump, respectively) that was in a severe recession. Covid was still killing tens of thousands of people every day, unemployment under Trump had been as high as 15% and millions of people were still out of work. The stock market had bottomed out under Trump, with the Dow Jones Avg. hitting a low of 23,000. Many economists were predicting a depression or a prolonged recession that would devastate our country. Moreover, our alliance system had been greatly weakened by Trump, the US had abdicated its leadership role in world affairs, and we were stuck in a war in Afghanistan that had lasted nearly twenty years and seemed to have no end in sight. Finally, the previous president, Trump, tried to overthrow the legitimate government and conduct a coup that would have, in effect, ended democracy.

With all of these obstacles in his path, Biden managed to pull us out of the mess he inherited. He used the full power of the government to facilitate the final development of a vaccine and distribute it to the people for free. The Covid crisis slowly subsided and people were able to return to work. The jobless rate improved dramatically, reaching levels not seen in six decades. The Dow recovered rapidly and now sits at an all-time high of over 44,000, thus helping everyone’s IRA and retirement accounts. Biden worked with the handful of Republicans who actually cared about the country more than they cared about Trump and passed important, bipartisan legislation such as the infrastructure bill. Every president of the 21^st Century had tried and failed to pass such a bill. As soon as the economy recovered, however, another crisis reared its head: inflation. As in Truman’s case, the rise of prices came about because of worldwide problems, in this case supply-line shortages caused by Covid and higher gas prices caused by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and sanctions put on Russian oil by the West. Every industrialized nation experienced bad inflation, but Biden’s aggressive approach to the problem meant that the US recovered faster and more effectively than the rest of the world.

In international affairs, he was equally successful. Bush, Jr., Obama, and Trump all promised to extricate us from the lengthy war situation in Afghanistan. All of them, though, quickly realized that to do so would be a messy and unpopular proposition. Biden was the only one to follow through with that promise. It was, as expected, an ugly withdrawal, and it could have been handled better. Still, he gets high marks for getting us out of an unwinnable war that had resulted in over 23,000 Americans being killed or wounded. Most important, Biden rebuilt the alliance system that had been greatly weakened by Trump. This became crucial in February, 2022, when Putin and the Russians invaded Ukraine as part of his plan to start a new Russian empire in Europe and Asia. Biden is seen as something of a hero in Europe for taking the lead in organizing NATO’s resistance to this naked aggression, and the US is a stronger nation because of this alliance. It should be noted that we would have not won WWI, WWII, or the Cold War without allies who helped present a united front to our enemies.

Biden was heavily criticized for his inability to solve the immigration problem at our southern border. In that regard, he certainly did no worse than the other three presidents in the 21^st Century. Trump proposes shutting down the border completely and expelling millions of immigrants now living in the US. My question to him would be: What do you plan to eat if you do that? I have recently seen some startling statistics about immigrant labor in this nation. In the lily-white state of Iowa, 73% of all agricultural workers were born in another country. In Wisconsin and Minnesota, as many as 80% of the low-paying, filthy jobs in the beef and pork industries are held by immigrants, most of them illegal. I expect that similar numbers of immigrants are involved in fruit-picking and other agricultural jobs across the country. Instead of railing about the problem without offering a real solution, as Trump continues to do, Biden worked with Republicans and law-enforcement authorities along the border and helped design an actual policy that would provide a possible solution to the problem. That plan, of course, was effectively vetoed by Trump, who ordered his GOP minions to defeat the bill rather than see Biden and the Democrats get credit for solving the problem.

Despite all of his accomplishments, the media, as they did with Truman, focused on Biden’s missteps and his obvious diminished capacity near the end of his term. As a result, his approval ratings hit a low of 36% at one point, bad, but not as low as Truman’s 22% or even Trump’s low of 34% when he was president. I believe that, fifty years from now, Biden’s presidential record, like that of Truman, will be re-evaluated and his status will be much higher than it is today. If one of those polls were taken today, I expect that Biden would rank somewhere between the top 15-20 presidents in history. Like Truman, though, I think history will be good to him, and he will rise into the top ten in a half-century.

Trump’s status is much easier to ascertain than that of Biden. Historians will certainly focus on one issue in evaluating his first term. The fact that he tried to instigate an insurrection, overrule the democratic election, and institute a coup d’état is the only factor that matters. That alone places Trump as the worst president in US history. No other person tried to interrupt the 250 years of peaceful transfers of power and establish himself as dictator.

Looking at the other factors historians use to evaluate presidents, Trump will fare no better. The only crisis he faced was the Covid virus that raged during his term in office, and he failed miserably in dealing with that issue. He gets points for helping allocate government money toward finding a vaccine, but he dramatically undermined that effort by downplaying the virulence of the virus. Focused much more on getting re-elected than dealing with the crisis, he pronounced it “no worse than the flu” and discouraged people from taking even the most rudimentary precautions. As a result, many thousands died needlessly because they refused to wear masks, avoid crowds, or get vaccinated when the shots were available. Domestically, the only meaningful thing he accomplished was a large tax break for corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Those tax breaks helped the top 3% of the people, but put the financial burden of the nation on the other 97%. Further, these breaks increased the national debt more than any president in history by greatly decreasing the amount of money the government took in each year. Our grandchildren will have to deal with that burden in the future, and the corporations repaid the government’s generosity by gouging the consumers and making inflation much worse when prices began to rise.  In terms of corruption, Trump’s administration stands alone. Never before has a president or former president been found guilty of multiple felonies (although Nixon was pardoned before he could face a judge or jury). The president himself, of course has been indicted and convicted of numerous crimes. Because of his stranglehold on the government and the judicial system, however, he will never be held accountable for those horrendous crimes. Moreover, dozens of his closest aides and accomplices in crime have already been convicted and have served time in prison.

In international affairs, Trump made the US a much weaker country. He failed to do anything about immigration except separate parents from children at the border and build 40 miles of a proposed 2000-mile-long wall. He vowed to get the US out of Afghanistan, but did nothing when he realized that such actions would be complicated. He withdrew from the nation’s traditional role of world leadership by refusing to take part in worldwide agreements concerning the environment or even standing up to Russia’s aggression. Instead, he lauded Putin and encouraged him by indicating the US would not stand in his way should he want to expand his borders in Eastern Europe. Finally, he denigrated the US military personnel by labelling anyone who fought for their country as “losers” and “suckers.” Even the generals who served under him have characterized Trump as a dangerous man with fascist tendencies. In short, there is no way to view Trump’s first term other than as a complete disaster. So, what does the US do with the worst President in American history? They give him a second chance.

It should be noted, of course, that Trump has not even started his second term, so his legacy is not yet complete. When he first took office in 2017, many observers urged caution in judging Trump prematurely. He can’t be as bad as he sounds, they said. No one could be that bad, they said. The Republicans in Congress will rein in his excesses and teach him how a responsible leader of the Free World behaves, they said. Instead, the GOP complied with all of his selfish wishes and kissed the ring (and other body parts) whenever he demanded. The result was a failed presidency of epic proportions. But perhaps this time will be different. Maybe he has learned from his countless mistakes and will now rule as a decent human being.

Perhaps. And perhaps Hell will freeze over, the world will stop spinning on its axis, and all leopards will suddenly change their spots. Check back with me in fifty years.