Trump ranks himself the greatest US president ever. Historians beg to differ

Donald Trump has declared himself to be the “greatest” US president ever, sharing a post on social media last week which graded him above the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D Roosevelt and George Washington. Experts take a different view.

Few presidential historians have previously suggested Trump holds such a place in the history books. After all, neither Lincoln, nor Roosevelt, nor Washington – the three leaders typically seen as America’s best – orchestrated an insurrection. None were impeached. And none of them were convicted of felonies over hush-money payments to a pornstar-turned-ghost hunter.

Trump has made clear how he feels about his performance. Does the president’s self-assessment match reality?

“It’s not consistent with the findings of the surveys we’ve conducted,” said Justin Vaughn, a political science professor at Coastal Carolina University and the co-creator of the Presidential Greatness Project, which polls experts to rank US presidents. “It’s also not consistent with other surveys that have been conducted over the last several years.”

Trump posted his presidential rankings last Thursday. It separated US presidents into six categories, from “greatest” to “failures”: he stands alone in the “greatest” grouping. The image in his post appears to have been adapted from a 1948 article in Life magazine, in which the historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jr muses about “what makes a president great or a failure” – that publication date would explain why certain presidents, including Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and both Bushes, are missing.

The original image didn’t have a “greatest” category – someone has retrospectively created that – while Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama have all been inserted in the “failures” category. Bill Clinton, perhaps surprisingly given the years Trump has spent attacking him, was deemed to be “average”.

Yet the most recent Presidential Greatness Project survey, which asked 154 academics about presidents, had rather different findings.

It saw Trump ranked dead last, below even James Buchanan, who is frequently blamed for not averting the civil war. The survey asked academics to rank each of the 45 presidents from 0 to 100, with 0 being “failure” and 100 meaning “great”. Lincoln was No 1, with an average rating of 93.87. Trump got a rating of 10.92.

Trump performed slightly better in a Siena University poll of 141 presidential scholars in 2022. In that study, he was ranked only third-to-last, besting Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, but opposed federal protections that would guarantee enslaved people’s rights to citizenship.

The Siena study also asked academics to rank presidents in various categories including “background”, “executive ability” and “leadership ability”. Trump was ranked 45th, out of 45, in the “integrity” and “intelligence” categories.

Trump might find some solace, however, in the fact that he has managed to unite academics on both the left and right of the political spectrum.

“We break down our results between self-identified Democrats or self-identified conservatives or Republicans,” Vaughn said. “When you look at the statistics of the Republican respondents versus the Democratic respondents, the Republicans also view Trump very poorly.”

Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, said: “President Trump is solely focused on fighting every day to deliver the strong, safe, and prosperous country that we all deserve. The only legacy President Trump is concerned with is making America greater than ever before.

“But when all is said and done, this President will undoubtedly go down as the most successful and consequential president in modern American history.”

Whether this prediction will come to pass will depend on how history treats Trump. Americans “have a kind of a golden glow about most ex-presidents”, said Barbara Perry, a professor in presidential studies​ at the University of Virginia, who noted that leaders have shifted in rankings over the decades, as their tenures are reassessed.

In any case, Trump’s personal rankings offered an insight into the presidents he admires. The “greatest” category included only Trump; under “great” came Lincoln, Roosevelt and Washington. “Near great” included Theodore Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland, who like Trump, served nonconsecutive terms as president.

Unfortunately Perry, as with Vaughn, took issue with Trump’s ranking. “In no universe of scholars, I believe, would Donald Trump be in the ‘great’ category, the ‘greatest’ category, ‘near great’ category,” she said.

“My view as a scholar and a constitutional historian would be that his promotion of the insurrection of January 6, and his continuation of perpetuating this view that Joe Biden stole the election: that is undermining the American constitutional system, the rule of law,” added Perry.