America has had a few great presidents: the four guys on Mt Rushmore, plus, I would argue, FDR. But it has had a lot of really, really bad ones. In no particular order:
Warren Harding: Pushed for the deregulation that led to the bank runs and stock market collapse of 1929, triggering the Great Depression. He was involved in a major corruption scandal involving oil companies, Teapot Dome, but he died before impeachment proceedings could be begun.
James Buchanan: Elected amid the strife of the movement to abolish slavery, he was a political weakling and in attempting to take a balanced position, wound up exacerbating tensions. The Civil War would have happened eventually, but Buchanan deserves credit for making it worse.
Herbert Hoover: Had he not inherited an unstable financial bubble from his predecessors Harding and Coolidge, we'd regard him as a merely middling president. But when, amid the dust bowl, the stock market collapsed, he reacted precisely wrong, implementing extensive austerity and using weapons against veterans marching to ask for food to feet their hungry families. Had he given the veterans what they wanted and nationalized the panicking banks, it would have been much less severe than it was.
Andrew Jackson: The "Trail of Tears", the brutal removal of native Americans from most of the eastern part of the country, is the worst, but there are lots more. He was pro-slavery. He was among our worst "gold bugs": he fought the adoption of paper currency. It is particularly ironic that his image has been on the $20 bill for a long time...
Andrew Johnson: he handled reconstruction very badly, and created anger both north and south. Like Clinton's, his impeachment was mostly partisan and is not really a knock on the guy.
Zachary Taylor: Hero of the Mexican war, both parties recruited him, but the Whigs got him. His weird outsider appeal and popular acclaim gave him political traction that he didn't deserve, but he proved completely incompetent. He deserves a lot of credit for setting up the circumstances that caused the civil war, and even more credit for destroying the Whig party.
Ronald Reagan: His incessant saber rattling extended the cold war 5 or 6 years and made the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union much worse than it needed to be. Iran Contra--not the worst thing he did by any means, but it was an act of high treason, deserving of impeachment and execution. The worst thing he did though was the undermining of the bank, business, environmental and other regulation, and the deliberate sabotaging of the unions and systems of public infrastructure. For all his saber rattling, Reagan set about destroying the infrastructure and industrial base that won World War II.
George W Bush: Our most incompetent and corrupt president. Rejected repeated warnings that terrorists were looking to attack, and when it came, used the attack for crassly partisan purposes. The first year of the Afghan war that ensued showed how skillful the CIA and special forces can be when they are allowed to be and how terribly impossible Afghanistan is to govern, especially from afar. He should have quit after a year instead of getting involved in the same quagmire as the Soviet Union had 20 years earlier. It makes it clear why a series of surgical strikes and indirect support, with clear commitment to not get directly involved, as was done in Kosovo, Libya and Syria, is so much more effective over the long term, although it clearly doesn't always work either. Instead, he diluted the forces in Afganistan and falsified evidence that Iraq had been involved in 9-11, and attacked a country that had been doing good work as a moderating influence in the middle east. What he got for his trouble were 5000 American dead (more if you count contractors), tens of thousands of maimed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, and a determined terrorist insurgency that is very much scarier than anything that existed before in the middle east. Never before have terrorists been even slightly competent--their few successes have mostly been luck. Daesh is something different. Torture, spying on Americans, forcing Americans to spy on their fellow citizens, stacking the Supreme Court with pro-corruption justices and more. This man and several of his inner circle should be in small concrete boxes in Belgium for the rest of their lives.
Richard Nixon: He sabotaged negotiations that would have ended the Vietnam war in 1968 for crassly partisan purposes. He naively gave full-throated support to Israel during and after the Yom Kippur war of 1974, which provoked Arab dominated OPEC to sharply reduce US oil supplies, provoking a very severe recession. His responses to the recession were just as bad, including price controls. The recession turned to inflation and went on at some level for 8 years. To try to defend against this, he and his proxies (in particular GHW Bush) put a lot of effort into strengthening relations with Saudi Arabia, for which we would pay a price later. Like Reagan, the offense that almost got him impeached was relatively minor: When some of his henchmen were caught breaking into the office of the DNC in order to dig up political intelligence, he attempted to cover it up. It turned out that this group had been doing lots of other dirty tricks at Nixon's behest.
Hiram Ulysses Simpson Grant. A brilliant general, but too much of a peacemaker. He surrounded himself with what proved to be crooks and incompetents, although there's little suggestion that he himself was a crook.
Chester A. Arthur: a Political sidekick and gofer, he was nominated for VP as a political sop for his boss, Roscoe Conkling. When Garfield was murdered by a deranged person and Arthur was elevated to the presidency, he proved relatively inactive and ineffectual, but that made him popular.
Not on this list:
Obama has been one of our very best presidents, not quite deserving of Mt Rushmore but has achieved a lot despite the most intransigent, malicious and destructive opposition since the civil war. Mitch McConnell has almost as much power as the president and he has used it almost entirely for evil.
Clinton was an above average president who held office during the rise of Newt Gingrich. His impeachment was for trivia and the American people knew that and repudiated the Rs for it.
Carter was an above average president who had the bad luck to inherit Nixon's recession and Eisenhower's Iran relationship. He was in every possible way a better president than Reagan.
Had he reacted better to the Gulf of Tonkin crisis, LBJ could have been a great president: the Great Society and Civil Rights laws were real steps forward. The Bush Supreme Court has done a lot of damage to both. LBJ was terrified that a considered response to what proved to be an imaginary attack would give the White House to Goldwater, which almost certainly would have ended in a nuclear holocaust.
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