This poll is not a poll. It’s a wardrobe malfunction:
The results from my fellow historians are now in: Donald Trump is not our worst president. Instead, James Buchanan continues to hold the bottom spot. Trump ranks in 41st place, with three presidents beneath him.
What this demonstrates, obviously, is an over-reliance on metrics for accurate evaluation of phenomena that resist easy quantification.
It sounds all so scientific, rank them along specific axes, maybe add a little bit of groovy statistical weighting and other hoohah and voila!
But a poll that would put Donald Trump, a monumentally corrupt, mentally ill, and utterly incompetent president who incited a riot and is directly responsible for the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans… a poll that would anoint Trump anything other than the unquestionably worst leader of America (to date)?
Please. To call such a poll “deeply flawed” is to give it too much credit.