What makes an unsuccessful president

Grant Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Bush Bill Clinton George W. Help inform the discussion Support the Miller Center.

University of Virginia Miller Center. John Quincy Adams: Impact and Legacy. But events happen in the world. From this comms perspective, at least, the main legislative initiative of the fall makes sense: an enormous bread-and-butter economic package, one that represents the transformational possibility of the Biden Presidency to both the progressive left and traditional Democratic constituencies. The case for Bidenism has been that it represents the most popular version of the Democratic agenda: an emphasis on the familiar center-left terrain of social insurance and public investment, and a nonideological focus on administrative competence that might help to reduce the cultural heat of politics, to de-Twitter it.

This version of Bidenism may not survive the fall. But addressing them might require reheating politics, rather than cooling it down. Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in and joined the magazine as a staff writer in He writes about American politics and society. Benjamin Wallace-Wells Commentary on American politics and society. 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. American presidents have a mixed record with epidemics. But neither Reagan nor Wilson actively promoted risky behavior for political purposes, nor did they personally obstruct federal-state partnerships that had been intended to control the spread of disease.

On those points, Trump stands alone. The third pillar of the case against Trump is his role as the chief instigator of the attempted insurrection of January 6. Although racism and violent nativism preceded Trump, the seeds of what happened on January 6 were planted by his use of the presidential bully pulpit. No president since Andrew Johnson had so publicly sympathized with the sense of victimhood among racists. In important ways, Nixon prefigured Trump by conspiring with his top lieutenants to use race, covertly, to bring about a realignment in U.

Trump has gone much further. From his remarks after the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to his effort to set the U. Both Trump and Nixon sought to subvert any serious efforts to deny them reelection. Nixon approved a dirty-tricks campaign, and his chief of staff Bob Haldeman approved the details of an illegal espionage program against the eventual Democratic nominee.

Nixon won his election but ultimately left office in the middle of his second term because the press, the Department of Justice, and Congress uncovered his efforts to hide his role in this subversion. Trump never won reelection. Instead, he mounted the first effort by a defeated incumbent to use the power of his office to overturn a presidential election.

Both men looked for weaknesses in the system to retain power. Holding a national election during a pandemic was a test of the resilience of American democracy. In practical terms, this meant taking the pressure off same-day voting—limiting crowds at booths—by encouraging voting by mail and advance voting.

Every candidate in the elections understood that tallying ballots would be slow in states that started counting only on Election Day. The campaign was vigorous and widespread. Lacking any actual evidence of widespread fraud, they lost in the courts. Despite having exploited every constitutional option, Trump refused to give up. It was at this point that Trump went far beyond Nixon, or any of his other predecessors. In , when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in U.

Nixon that Nixon had to turn over his White House tapes to a special prosecutor, Nixon also ran out of constitutional options. He knew that the tapes proved his guilt, and would likely lead to his impeachment and then to his conviction in the Senate. On July 24, Nixon said he would comply with the order from a coequal branch of our government, and ultimately accepted his political fate.

In the end, even our most awful presidents before believed in the continuation of the system they had taken an oath to defend. But not Trump.