Senate, as a U. House, before stepping into the White House and facing immediately the greatest crisis in U. Most people think he did pretty well. Trump, despite his lack of relevant prior experience in government, might have been fine if it were just about experience. See our full republication guidelines for more information. To republish, copy the HTML at right, which includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to MinnPost.
By Eric Black Columnist. Eric Black Ink. When secessionists in South Carolina set siege to a federal fort, Buchanan collapsed.
During the Whiskey Rebellion of , President George Washington had led the militia against the Pennsylvania rebels. When federal officeholders resigned in the South, Buchanan did not use his authority to replace them. He even had to be deterred by his Cabinet from simply surrendering Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, and ultimately made only a feeble effort to defend the fort, sending an unarmed merchant ship as relief.
The next great presidential failure in U. Enter the third of the three men who eclipsed Harding: Andrew Johnson.
Lincoln had picked Johnson as his running mate in to forge a unity ticket for what he expected to be a tough reelection bid. A pro-Union Democrat, Johnson had been the sole southern senator in not to leave Congress when his state seceded.
An unrepentant white supremacist, he opposed efforts to give freedmen the vote, and when Congress did so over his objections, Johnson impeded their enjoyment of that right. He wanted slavery by another name in the South, undermining the broad consensus in the victorious North.
Johnson used his pulpit to bully those who believed in equal rights for formerly enslaved people and to encourage a culture of grievance in the South, spreading myths about why the Civil War had occurred in the first place. Many people are responsible for the toxic views and policies that have so long denied Black Americans basic human rights, but Andrew Johnson was the first to use the office of the presidency to give that project national legitimacy and federal support.
That got him impeached by the House. A Republican Senate then fell one vote short of removing him from office. All three of these 19th-century presidents compiled awful records, but Buchanan stands apart because—besides undermining the Union, using his office to promote white supremacy, and demonstrating dereliction of duty in the decisive crisis of secession—he led an outrageously corrupt administration.
He violated not just the second part of his oath, betraying the Constitution, but also the first part. Buchanan managed to be more corrupt than the low standard set by his contemporaries in Congress, which is saying something. In the s, President Andrew Jackson had started steering these lucrative contracts to friends.
By the s, congressional investigators found that bribes were being extorted from would-be government printers, and that those who won contracts were kicking back a portion of their profits to the Democratic Party.
Buchanan directly benefited from this system in the election. Although he signed reforms into law in , he swiftly subverted them by permitting a subterfuge that allowed his key contributor—who owned a prominent pro-administration newspaper—to continue profiting from government printing.
Does Trump have any modern competitors for the title of worst president? Like Harding, a number of presidents were poor executors of the office. President Herbert Hoover helped drive the U. President George W. These presidents were each deeply flawed, but not in the same league as their predecessors who steered the country into Civil War or did their utmost to deprive formerly enslaved people of their hard-won rights while rewarding those who betrayed their country.
Before Trump, Nixon set the standard for modern presidential failure as the first president forced from office, who resigned ahead of impeachment. And in many ways, their presidencies have been eerily parallel. Like the 45th president, Nixon ascended to office by committing an original sin. As the Republican presidential nominee, Nixon intervened indirectly to scuttle peace negotiations in Paris over the Vietnam War.
He was worried that a diplomatic breakthrough in the 11th hour of the campaign would help his Democratic rival, Hubert Humphrey. For Nixon, it set the pattern for future presidential lies and cover-ups. Trump, too, put his political prospects ahead of any sense of duty.
Then, as Russia dumped hacked emails from her campaign chair, he seized on the pilfered materials to suggest wrongdoing and amplified Russian disinformation efforts. But those failures have more to do with the first part of his oath.
The case that Trump is not just the worst of our modern presidents but the worst of them all rests on three other pillars, not all of which have a Nixonian parallel. Trump is the first president since America became a superpower to subordinate national-security interests to his political needs.
But it cannot compare, in terms of the harm to U. Trump, of course, is not the first president to have been surprised by a threat to our country. Franklin D. Roosevelt was caught off guard by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Trump, like FDR, could have tried to redeem himself by his management of the response. Instead of adapting, he dug in, denying the severity of the challenge and the importance of mask wearing and social distancing while bemoaning the likely damage to his beloved economy.
Trump, instead, ignored his own experts and advisers, searching constantly for some silver bullet that would relieve him of the necessity of making hard choices. He threw money at pharmaceutical and biotech firms to accelerate work on vaccines, with good results, but went AWOL on the massive logistical effort administering those vaccines requires. In doubling down on his opposition to basic public-health measures, the president crossed a new line of awfulness.
Trump then organized a series of in-person rallies that sickened audience members and encouraged a wider public to put themselves at risk. Trump channeled the same divisive spirit that Pierce and Buchanan had tapped by turning requests from the governors of the states that had been the hardest hit by the coronavirus into opportunities for partisan and sectarian attack.
Fifty-eight thousand Americans had already died of the virus when Trump signaled that ignoring or actively violating public-health mandates was a patriotic act. Over the summer, even as the death toll from COVID mounted, Trump never stopped bullying civic leaders who promoted mask wearing, and continued to hold large in-person rallies, despite the risk of spreading the virus. When the president himself became sick in the fall, rather than being sobered by his personal brush with serious illness, the president chose to turn a potential teachable moment for many Americans into a grotesque carnival.
He used his presidential access to experimental treatment to argue that ordinary Americans need not fear the disease. As sovereign States, they, and they alone, are responsible before God and the world for the slavery existing among them. Wisely limited and restrained as is his power under our Constitution and laws, he alone can accomplish but little for good or for evil on such a momentous question.
Buchanan retired to his estate in central Pennsylvania and lived to see the end of the Civil War. Toggle navigation. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up.
0コメント