Is Donald Trump controversial? Of course. All effective presidents are controversial. When Washington became president, already over a 100,000 thousand colonists left America. They did not want to live under a constitutional republic. Beginning a Civil War was controversial, sparking draft riots in New York City. Fighting the Soviet Union was controversial. Cutting tax rates and shrinking government was and is controversial.
More importantly, to historians who are of a more conservative bent and thus more open minded including myself, Trump will score high. Quite frankly, conservative historians are more prominent and consequential than left wing historians.
We've now had forty-seven presidents, most of them mediocre to bad. Take Joe Biden. History will record him as not only America's worst president, but our most corrupt. His name will become a noun as in "pulling a Biden" in the future. Was he truly evil? I don’t know. That is for theologians to decide. But he was truly of bad character.
Using the Federalist Papers as a guide, a historian can make that judgment. John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, the authors of the Federalist Papers hammered over and over that the most important qualification for a president was character. They cited character dozens of times as in “the real character of the chief executive.”
Right behind Biden is Barack Obama. He was only skilled in the study of himself which is why I called him our nation's "first Facebook president." He never met a first-person pronoun he did not like. He is shallow and left no real measurable accomplished in his eight years except to grow government and any dope can do that. He turned in an anemic 2 % growth.
Pulling up the rear with Biden and Obama are John Tyler, Millard Filmore, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and both Bushes. They were uniformly bad presidents but I won’t say any of them had a bad character. Except Johnson and Biden. The others were just inept, in over their heads.
Judging any of them by the standards of today is lazy presentism.
But all these presidents left America worse than they found her. All are judged by history to be failed presidents. Especially Biden.
Presidents who are in the great category include George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR and Ronald Reagan. All did great things. Washington's accomplishments were too numerous to mention. Abraham Lincoln's was to defeat the scourge of slavery while FDR's was winning WW II and Ronald Reagan's was defeating the despicable Soviet Union and winning the Cold War while restoring American morale.
A wise old historian once said the main qualification for rating a presidency was, “did he free or save many people?” By that standard, you’d have to include those four men.
Trump is already measurably leaving America better that he found it. The scourge of illegals plaguing us with their many and manifest crimes appears to be over. He has solved the rampant inflation left us by Biden. The economy is on track again, after costing investors billions of dollars under Biden.
At another level, Trump is confronting a corrupt and dictatorial big, bloated government. This is no easy task to practice federalism as Trump is now doing. Ask George Washington. He was fighting a big, corrupt and dictatorial government in the form of the British Empire. Washington had an advantage. He could shoot his enemies whereas Trump must rely on his persuasive skills.
Also, and this cannot be discounted, Trump is moving with alacrity on his legislative agenda. Each of his positions are designed to help the American people. Most presidents have the “slows.” Just look at military morale shooting up from Biden to Trump. Now, America’s fighting men are proud to be led into battle by Trump unlike under Biden when they were ashamed to put on the uniform.
The majority of Americans believe we are now on the right track as opposed to just one year ago under Biden when America was miserable. Every American woke up to a bleak day.
And there is a dialectic to America politics. Every twenty to forty years, there comes an election that send America wildly off in a new direction. From Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson to Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and now to Trump. Each election has rejected the status quo in favor of a new paradigm.
Lest we forget, Trump fashioned the Abraham Accords, a break from the old order. Who in their wildest dreams imagined twenty years ago there would be five Arab embassies in Israel? This is an accomplishment of earth-shaking proportions and he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, but the Nobel Committee is decided left wing, content on giving a prize to Obama for simply being…Obama.
He’s gotten American and Israeli hostages out when Biden was still sleeping. He got the Big, Beautiful Bill passed over manufactured opposition but it contains much to take power away from Washington and government and sends it back to the states, localities and individuals, where the Framers intended power to be.
Trump is so clearly controlling the agenda, he is ushering in a new period of Republican governance, just as Lincoln did and just as FDR did with Democrats. He has positioned the Republican party to have the answers to the problems afflicting Americans.
I don’t know how Trump will finally end up among the panoply of presidents but as for me, this historian will rank him high.
Author Craig Shirley is the author of eleven best-selling books including six on Ronald Reagan and two on World War II as well as the definitive biography of Mary Bell Washington, George Washington’s mother. His latest book is, The Search for Reagan.
- Big Beautiful Bill
- Donald Trump agenda
- Trump approval ratings
- political polls
- tax rates
- federal spending
- Medicaid spending
- Trump tax cuts
- Congress approval rate
- Trump voters
- Liberal media
- CNN
