Top 10 Worst Presidents, Part 1

My ultimate ranking of the baddest of the bad

I get this question in every Ask Me Anything livestream and every Twitter thread. I usually limit it to 5 Presidents but unfortunately there are so many truly terrible Presidents, I decided to reassess and expand my list to include 10 of the worst. These are in no particular order, except for maybe according to my level of visceral hate. So let’s get started.

1. Woodrow Wilson

The first President on the list is Woodrow Wilson, of course. I have made an entire TikTok series about all of his failings as a leader and they’re truly not difficult to find because there are SO many. Wilson was a terrible negotiator, his lopsided neutrality policy dragged the US into WW1 and his failure at convincing a nationalistic Britain and France to treat average German citizens with any dignity or fairness resulted in a wide open path for Adolf Hitler to ascend to power. During treaty negotiations he brought nothing to the table other than a humanitarian vision for a united world going forward, France and Britain had each lost nearly an entire generation of young men and mainland Europe was battle scarred from Normandy to the borders of Russia. They weren’t interested in unity, they wanted revenge and reparations. They felt deeply that Germany should be severely punished and in getting their way, they mapped their own futures on the path to WW2.

As if that weren’t enough Wilson was a nightmare domestically; he passed the Federal Reserve Act and implemented the income tax, allowed his Attorney General to terrorize citizens with mass arrests (10,000 in one month!), imprisoned German Americans in internment camps during WW1 (where do you think FDR got that idea?), and perpetuated racist policies that caused riots all over the country leaving 150 people dead in 2 years. Some of the worst offenses were re-segregating the military, firing or demoting every single black federal employee, and hosting a screening of Birth of a Nation at the White House. The movie is a deeply disturbing depiction of racial attitudes during the time, painting the KKK as the saviors of the South in the post Civil War period. I could write a whole article about how much I dislike Wilson, in fact I probably will at some point, I think these reasons are enough to land him in the top spot on my list.

2. Franklin D. Roosevelt

FDR is just about equal to Wilson in my eyes, although Wilson is the only one I actually lie awake at night angry about and can you really blame me? FDR is nearly as bad. Before he ever became President, FDR ran a sting operation to entrap gay sailors by having federal agents seduce them and then he ordered the sailors arrested and kicked out of the military. The New Deal should probably have been called The Raw Deal because it obliterated the progress Hoover made in economic recovery during the Great Depression and actually caused the Depression to last even longer. Some experts speculate that if not for WW2, the economy would not have fully recovered until the mid 1950’s. Yikes! The kicker is, The New Deal still hasn’t been fully paid for. Yes, you heard that right. The New Deal has still not been paid in full. Roosevelt ran elections like organized crime and was known to facilitate and encourage election fraud in order to help candidates he liked, his administration acted much like an organized crime ring.

His domestic war policies were frightening; he turned away the St. Louis, a ship filled with Jewish refugees from Europe and sent them back to their deaths and put thousands of American citizens in internment camps, not just the Japanese. He imprisoned Italians and German Americans as well and appointed Alabama’s KKK member Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. Black upheld incarceration of Japanese Americans and further attempts to pack the court were blocked but he did try. He was also soft on Communism and his administration was rife with Marxist sympathizers. At the 1945 Yalta Conference he refused to listen to Churchill’s warnings and turned Eastern Europe over to the Soviets, forcing Eastern Europeans to live under oppression which included labor camps, organized starvations, and extreme poverty. Congress was so frightened by the way he wielded executive power, they immediately passed term limits after his death.

3. Andrew Jackson

Thomas Jefferson called Andrew Jackson a dangerous man because he thought he was a political fanatic who lacked good manners and was dangerous to American politics. Jefferson described Jackson as common, troubled, complicated, and temperamental. Jackson’s biggest failing was exceeding the powers of his office. He allowed Georgia to evict the Cherokee from their land and with the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 authorized the forced migration of numerous indigenous tribes from 3 states to trek hundreds of miles to present day Oklahoma. It effectively destroyed their culture and permanently depressed the tribes into a state of poverty and life as second class citizens. Jackson had a habit of appointing his cronies into important government positions and it is alleged that he started the “spoils system” in American government. His economic policies were mixed but contributed heavily to the Panic of 1837 and prior to that in 1832 taxes he levied were deemed unconstitutional by the state of South Carolina and The Nullification Crisis occurred. Overall, if a President presides over an atrocity like the Trail of Tears, they make the top 5 on my worst Presidents list.

4. James Buchanan

This one is another doozy, Buchanan always makes my list for being the man that enabled and encouraged the policies that heavily contributed to the Civil War. On the eve of his election Congress passed a bill he supported, the Tariff Bill of 1857, which lowered tariffs on a myriad of items from abroad. Buchanan wanted to stimulate foreign trade but in the process managed to make domestic goods of the same type less competitive. A few days after his election the Supreme Court heard the Dred Scott case, where they decided that African Americans were not only unable to become citizens but that the federal government could not outlaw slavery in it’s territories. Buchanan heavily influenced the case’s outcome and thought it would permanently put the slavery issue to rest, clearly he was wrong. The President did not necessarily have pro-slavery views but he viewed abolitionists as more of a threat to the Union than slave-owners.

The reaction the Dred Scott decision kicked off a series of disastrous economic problems that resulted in the Panic of 1857. Railroad stocks started to decline in value, then a contagion hit, and the industry was in a total free fall. By summer of 1857, six major railroads were either shut down or had declared bankruptcy. Thousands were thrown out of work, and banks started foreclosing on loans and property; every bank in New York City effectively closed—none would convert coins or gold into bank notes. The oldest grain company in New York, N.H. Wolfe and Co., failed in August, as did the most prominent insurance business in the country, the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Co. While the economy in the North was in shambles, the South was still trading cotton in the European market, which further painted Buchanan as a Southern sympathizer. As regional tensions grew and Buchanan’s term drew to a close, Southern states started seceding from the Union, Buchanan took the unusual position that the Constitution did not allow secession, but the president could not do anything to prevent it.

His foreign policy wasn’t any better than his domestic policies. He supported William Walker’s forays to conquer Nicaragua and Guatemala, and sent troops to try to annex parts of Paraguay. Then there was the Pig War, started when a settler along the Canadian border on the San Juan straits in the Northwest, shot a pig owned by the Hudson Bay Co. that wandered onto his property. The resulting standoff lasted until Buchanan sent troops to calm the nonfatal battle, wherein the only casualty was a pig. For all of these reasons and more, Buchanan deserves a spot on the top half of the top 10 list.

5. Andrew Johnson

His bodyguard described him as, “a man destined to conflict,” no doubt referring to the way Johnson treated other people. He openly called anyone who disagreed with him disloyal or even treasonous. He liberally dished insults during public speeches and flat out ignored answers he didn’t like. He regularly put other people into difficult positions, then blamed them when things went sour. He was notoriously thin skinned. Johnson saw himself as a principled defender of the people against Washington insiders bent on destroying the republic. This sounds strangely familiar after the last 4 years, no? He saw his opponents as enemies bent not just on impugning the legitimacy of his presidency but whose “intention is to incite assassination.” He assumed office in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination so it seemed in some ways, a very real possibility. When Congress refused to seat senators and representatives from the reconstructed states of the former Confederacy, he claimed congressional leaders were riding roughshod over the Constitution.

Johnson favored a very lenient version of Reconstruction and state control over voting rights, and he openly opposed the 14th Amendment. Although he had supported an end to slavery he wrote, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Bill, but Congress overrode it. In his reasoning for the veto Johnson argued that African-Americans, lacked “the requisite qualifications to entitle them to the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States.” He asserted, the law discriminated “against large numbers of intelligent, worthy, and patriotic foreigners [who had to reside in the U.S. for five years to qualify for citizenship] in favor of the negro.” So we’re not off to a good start here.

After the New Orleans massacre in 1866 he claimed, “Every drop of blood that was shed is upon their skirts, and they are responsible for it.” Johnson implied whites who encouraged blacks to demand the right to vote bore responsibility for the 37 African-American and white Unionist casualties and the over 100 wounded. He did not blame the white mob or police that aided them for anything. Somehow, he survived an impeachment trial, possibly because there was no vice president to replace him, and moderates feared Benjamin Wade, the Senate president pro tempore who would have replaced Johnson. He returned to Tennessee disgraced but was promptly re-elected to US Senate by sympathetic Southern voters. He died shortly after his election and did not get to make the grand political comeback he intended.

I know you may disagree with one or two of these but remember there is a part 2 and the President you think is the worst will probably make an appearance. Fear not, Lincoln, LBJ, and others are coming up very soon and I spare no feelings.