The country’s worst-ever president attacks its best university and one of the greatest institutions in human history. Based on Donald Trump’s first term, the Presidential Greatness Project ranked him 45th — the worst U.S. president, with a score of 10.9. The behaviors that made him worst have strengthened in his second term.
So the worst is becoming more so.
The greatest US president, according to the poll, was Abraham Lincoln, with a score of 93.9, followed by FDR (90.8), Washington (90.3), and Theodore Roosevelt (78.6).
Trump: Officially the Worst President Ever According to Academics
This is the third such survey by University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus and Coastal Carolina University professor Justin Vaughn.
Results are based on nearly 200 responses from scholars across multiple disciplines whose work engages presidential politics.
The 2024 edition of their survey put Joe Biden in 14th place, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan. Biden’s 62.6 score tied him with John Adams.
At 45th from the t0p, Trump ranked just below fellow impeachee Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan, the perennial cellar-dweller in such ratings due to his inept pre-Civil War leadership.
The Worst President Goes to War Against the Best University
To rank universities is complicated, because they excel in different ways.
Princeton is notable for its undergraduate programs. Faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, John Kennedy claimed in 1963, had won more Nobel prizes than any other country.
MIT and Harvard produced technology that helped the United States defeat Germany and Japan. MIT continues to be a world leader in innovation.
Still, Harvard has long been seen as the world’s leading university, followed by Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, Tsinghua, Tokyo, and ETH in Zurich. The daughter of Xi Jinping chose to study at Harvard.
Founded in 1636, Harvard is the oldest US university. It published the country’s first book, the Bible in Algonquin in 1663 and operated its first diversity program. Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck of the Wampanoag tribe graduated from Harvard College in 1665. Harvard graduated his first Black Ph.D., W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1895.
It educated eight US presidents—from John and John Quincy Adams to Republicans Rutherford P. Hayes and Teddy Roosevelt, to Democrats FDR and John F. Kennedy, to Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama. (My own graduate study was at the now infamous Columbia, shortly after Dwight D. Eisenhower served five years as its rather part-time president.)
Why would Trump attack such a body of higher learning? How does that make any sense?
The Greatest Institutions and Why They Fell
By what standards could we evaluate the greatest institution in human history?
If length of influence is the measure, ancient Athens prevails. For 2,500 years, its philosophers, dramatists, historians, architects, sculptors, astronomers, and mathematicians have nurtured Western civilization. The funeral oration of Pericles, delivered in 431 BCE, extols democracy as the key to Athenian greatness and sets out ideals that inspire some politicians more than two millennia later. Greek roots enrich our vocabulary from “democracy” (dēmokratía) to “philosophy” (philosophía), to “biology” (bíos=life + lógos=study). Much of the New Testament was written in Greek.
The institutions of Uruk, Merös, Thebes, Persepolis, Mohenjo-daro, Xian, Teotihuacon, and other ancient civilizations made great achievements but recognition of their import has been limited by many factors including difficulties in understanding their languages.
Zoroaster, who probably lived in the 6th or 7th century BCE, came from the region of Balkh in today’s Afghanistan, but his religion spread from Persia to Babylon, where Jews encountered it and fell under its influence. Its concepts spread to Christianity and then to Islam
From about 750 to 1150 CE, S. Frederick Starr argues in Enlightenment Lost, Central Asia was the intellectual hub of the world—the one region whose activities impinged on other intellectual centers in India, China, the Middle East, and Europe. Many Central Asian scholars went to Baghdad, but there was also a reverse brain drain. Central Asian polymaths were polyglots. They considered it normal to live amid a bewildering profusion of languages and alphabets and master whichever ones they needed.
Why did the Central Asian enlightenment wither? Mongol invasions played a role, but urban areas they ravaged recovered in short order. The decline of traffic on the Silk Road meant less stimulation from diverse cultures. Both in Persian and Turkic Central Asia, as in the Arab heartland and in Persia proper, a steadily rigidifying Muslim orthodoxy gradually narrowed the spheres in which free thought and humanism could be exercised.
Today’s MAGA attacks on education, scientific research, and free expression menace the creative life not only in US universities but in every domain of American life. History will not judge such actions kindly from what many consider now, officially, the worst president ever.
About the Author: Dr. Walter Clemens
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Boston University. He wrote The Republican War on America: Dangers of Trump and Trumpism (2023)
