2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey Ranks Trump Dead Last

Deciding the best president is a subjective endeavor, as some inhabitants of the Oval Office ranked in the top five are praised for efforts to end slavery, while others enslaved people and were reportedly cruel slave masters.

The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey was released on President’s Day 2024. Despite some present vocal disapproval of Biden’s presidency, a panel of historians ranked him in the top third of presidents in American history. Donald Trump, his opponent in this presidential cycle, was ranked at or near the bottom by historians across all political spectrums. As NPR reported, Trump sits behind Andrew Jackson, who was also impeached, and James Buchanan, who is remembered negatively for his leadership leading into the Civil War. Buchanan is also infamous for saying that Black people had “no rights which the white man must respect.”

As political scientists Brandon Rottinghaus from the University of Houston and Justin S. Vaughn from Coastal Carolina University pointed out in the survey, the partisanship of the political scientists doesn’t change the overall rankings; they do note differences. “While partisanship and ideology don’t tend to make a major difference overall, there are a few distinctions worth noting.”

Those distinctions show up most markedly in the ranking of Biden, depending on the political affiliation of the experts, ranked as high as 13th and as low as 30th. Liberals ranked him at 13, while moderates had him at 20, and conservatives rated him as the 30th best president of all time. Conversely, all three of those groups ranked Trump in the bottom five positions, citing his penchant for flouting the norms of the office.

A kind of reverse Lincoln effect can be attributed to Trump as some of the positive reception of Biden is because of the president he succeeded. Lincoln, who was sandwiched between Buchanan and Jackson, is who some say is arguably the best president to ever inhabit the Oval Office.

Though Biden is looked upon favorably by historians, in the present moment, polling suggests a lack of confidence in his policy direction and criticism for his age despite Trump being around the same age. Trump also faces disapproval over a largely divisive one-term presidency as well as 91 felony criminal counts, which have not hampered his candidacy for the Republican nomination in the slightest.

The pair explains the ideological divide between the experts, writing, “Republicans and Conservatives rank George Washington as the greatest president.” Democrats placed him either second or third. The authors continued, “There are also several presidents where partisan polarization is evident — Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden — but interestingly not for Bill Clinton.”

Deciding the best president is subjective, as some inhabitants of the Oval Office ranked in the top five are praised for efforts to end slavery. In contrast, others enslaved people and were reportedly cruel slave masters. Harry S. Truman, who ranks just behind Barack Obama at eight, made the call to drop a pair of atomic bombs on Japanese civilians during World War II. Thus, these rankings will not necessarily square with everyone’s experience of the United States of America and the actions of its President, both at home or abroad. According to Rosenhaus and Vaughn, the survey represents a chance for historians and experts to contextualize the opinions of present-day presidents in a broader historical context.