The progressive news outlet The New Republic put out their ranking of the top ten best and bottom ten worst Presidents of the United States last month.
We here at Hungarian Conservative published our subjective ranking of the best and worst US presidents for Presidents’ Day 2025—only, based on the length of description and factual foundation for each entry, we put a lot more effort into our piece.
As for this recent ranking by The New Republic, it is quite evident what the main goal was: ranking the incumbent President Donald Trump as the worst in American history. ‘Some experts voted for him twice—once for each term,’ they write in his entry. There lies a problem immediately: typically, you would not expect ‘the worst President ever’ to be reelected for a second term, consecutive or non-consecutive.
President Trump defined all ‘experts’ who gave him a minimal chance of victory already when he won the presidency in 2016 (throwing a wrench into the credibility of the ‘appeal to authority’ arguments against his merits as POTUS). He got more votes than any other sitting President in US history in the 2020 election, 74.2 million, but lost to Democrat challenger Joe Biden.
In 2024 he won the nomination of his party for a third time in a row, an unprecedented feat in the modern, legally binding primary system in place since 1972. President Trump won the general election as well in 2024, becoming only the second President in US history to serve non-consecutive terms after Grover Cleveland, which gives him yet another special distinction in American history.
A more credible contender for the worst POTUS title among those serving in recent years would be Joe Biden. President Biden, despite being eligible under the 22nd Amendment, did not even stand for reelection for a second term. While he himself expressed his intentions to do so multiple times, and even won his primary, members of his own party publicly pressured him to drop out. They simply saw no reasonable path for him to beat President Trump due to his wide unpopularity, fueled by concerns over his mental acuity in his old age, and a high inflationary period during his term in office.
However, President Biden is noticeably absent from The New Republic’s ranking of the ten worst presidents in US history.
Still, ranking President Biden as the worst POTUS in American history would be foolish. People like President Andrew Johnson or President Herbert Hoover were directly culpable in the white supremacist terror in the South in the post-Civil War era and the Great Depression, respectively, which were some of the worst plights suffered by the American people. Accordingly, neither of them got to serve more than one term either.
In a very recent development under President Trump’s presidency, the second quarter of 2026, his sixth year in office in total, just ended for the stock markets. The primary American stock index, the Dow Jones, ended the quarter up 8.14 per cent year-to-date.
The Dow closed in the positive four out of five times in President Trump’s full years in office as well, the only exception being 2018. Evidently, you would not expect a prolonged threat of a constitutional crisis under a ‘dangerous’ President to be very conducive to domestic market growth…
Claims about the constitutional threat that President Trump supposedly poses to the Republic are also questionable, given that he has thus far complied with all the rulings issued by the Supreme Court. The current SCOTUS has a bench made up of six justices appointed by Republican Presidents, three of whom were appointed by Trump himself; thus, the majority—although not all—of his agenda has no problem clearing the highest court’s approval in the first place.
Of course, there is a very clear explanation for that in the simple minds of the history writers at The New Republic: it is the worst Supreme Court in US history, simple as that.
Apparently, overlooking some of the worst events leading up to or right after the American Civil War is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if it allows you to score some cheap political points with a modern audience. Thus, why not rank the current SCOTUS below Chief Justice Roger B Taney’s court, which issued the infamous Dred Scott decision?
Popular Perception of Donald Trump as President
Given that President Trump is, in fact, the sitting President of the United States after winning the 2024 presidential election by receiving 77.3 million votes nationally, the perception of his abilities by historians and pundits should not be too much of a concern for him. He was able to convince so many Americans to vote for him despite content about his supposed extraordinary failures as POTUS being a lot more prevalent in the media during his first and President Biden's only term in office.
As for presidential rankings, the most viewed content of that sort by far that includes President Trump is one made by conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro. His piece was published in December 2020 and has 4.2 million views on YouTube. It ranks Trump in the B tier, while it ranks popular two-term Democratic President Barack Obama in the F tier.
In addition, Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has stated on the record multiple times that he ranks President Trump just below President George Washington and President Abraham Lincoln among the greatest POTUS's of all time. Gingrich was not only a history professor before entering politics, but is also an influential figure in American history himself, having led the effort to win a majority in the House of Representatives for the Republican Party for the first time in 40 years in 1994.
Nonetheless, his assessment of President Trump's place among US Presidents is also preposterous, although on the other end of the spectrum compared to The New Republic.
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