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Donald Trump rated last by researchers

Worldtraveller said:
Ugh, I hate the 'Jimmy Carter was out of his depth' hot take. He was not. He was the first president in modern times to experience the waxing shitstorm that the GQP has fully become. He was stymied by the republican congress repeatedly and continuously, moreso than any president prior, but not since. He was in office during the rise of the religious right, who then installed ronnie raygun and really started to fuck things up.

Carter was, in reality, one of the best presidents we had.
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Carter had a Democratic majority in both houses throughout his term, and a supermajority in the House and Senate during his first two years in office.
 
Carter had poor relations with the Democrats in Congress, especially the progressive wing led by Ted Kennedy, who of course later ran against Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980.
 
Carter was a forerunner of Bill Clinton’s so-called New Democrats and later of Barack Obama. All three were unfortunate departures from the Democratic Party’s progressive New Freedom/New Deal/Fair Deal/New Frontier/Great Society legacy of the 20th century. Carter was a late 20th-century Democrat who was a conservative, a throwback to late 19th-century style Democrats as exemplified by President Grover Cleveland. He had a poor relations with a Democratic congress, was a poor public speaker, and articulated no vision for the country. He had some notable successes, including the Camp David accords, but it was Carter, not Reagan, who ultimately ditched Nixon’s detente to resume an adversarial stance with Moscow after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Carter is rated rather poorly by academic historians and I think that assessment is accurate.
 
pood said:
Carter is rated rather poorly by academic historians and I think that assessment is accurate.
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If the criteria are about performance, I agree. The redeeming thing about Carter in my mind, is not poor performance, it's complete lack of performance, which I prefer in most cases. When the then current Russian conglomeration (USSR) invaded Afghanistan for instance, I was rolling my eyes about the next dumbshit thing the US would do. But it was kind of a self resolving problem. And Carter was fairly calm, for which Republicans tried to pillory him iirc.
Of course Reagan promised the moon, and swore that the trickled down wealth would rain in torrents down upon the masses. Turns out he may have exaggerated, but Carter's very demeanor made him quite unable to respond without drowning in a sea of economic jargon and doublespeak.
Anyhow, I don't remember any inaction for which I resent Carter, but I certainly recall a lot of Reagan's actions in that light.
 
Laing & McCaffrie - The Impossible Leadership Situation.pdf - "The Impossible Leadership Situation? Analyzing Success for Disjunctive Presidents" - by Matthew Laing and Brendan McCaffrie
(I can't get the link to work right - search for "Disjunctive Presidents wpsanet")

Discusses Stephen Skowronek's political-time theory.

Skowronek’s first type, reconstructive presidents, oppose a regime that is vulnerable and failing and therefore have the greatest structural opportunities to act. They remove the prior regime and develop a new one based on novel ideas that endure and influence the course of future decisions and programs. Reconstructive leaders typically exercise active leadership that creates major changes and leaves an enduring legacy.
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Thus starting a new political paradigm, starting a new era in US politics. Reconstructors get above-average ratings, and sometimes top ratings: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt (?), Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan.
Presidents of articulation are affiliated with regime ideas and supporters when the regime is resilient and unlikely to collapse. They build upon their reconstructive predecessors’ work, but without the same towering authority.
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Notable ones are Harry Truman, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, George Bush I and II.
Pre-emptive presidents oppose a resilient regime. Their opposition is generally rebuffed by regime adherents in public and political spheres. When pre-emptive presidents use their power aggressively the resulting showdowns usually end controversially and leave presidents with diminished reputations.
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Notable ones are Teddy Roosevelt (?), Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
Finally, disjunctive presidents, in whom this paper is primarily interested, are affiliated with a decaying, vulnerable regime. These presidents have the least authority to act and history usually judges them as incompetent failures.
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Their Presidencies are at the ends of political eras, ending political paradigms: John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Jimmy Carter.
 
Generally, disjunctive presidents receive less credit for their achievements than other types of president do. Their limited capacity to gain interpretive success means that disjunctive presidents’ material successes often belie their reputations. By contrast, reconstructive presidents’ outstanding reputations mean that they are often personally credited with achievements that may not have been their own. As, for example, early steps towards economic intervention against the Great Depression carried out by Herbert Hoover have been often overlooked or attributed to Franklin Roosevelt.
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Yes, toward the end of an era, preemptive and disjunctive Presidents may start pushing policies typical of following eras. That was notable in the policies of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter - these Presidents had some policies typical of Gilded Age II.

"Although Skowronek’s three other types of president are able to achieve partisan regime success, this form is very limited for disjunctive presidents."

Then "normative success" - "Normative success has two elements, one being the need for presidents to improve and preserve society and work for the common good (see Hargrove 1998); the other is to preserve and uphold the Constitution and the office of the presidency."

"Disjunctive presidents have particular difficulty balancing these two tasks, often because the very meaning of the Constitution and the role of government is questioned during disjunctions."

Disjunctive presidents’ limited interpretive success often leads to an impression that they are ineffective and therefore that they lack authenticity and principle. As their oppositions are typically strong, disjunctive leaders are held to account more than other types. Additionally, their divided supporters are not entirely committed to defending them. Disjunctive leaders tend to fail in terms of encouraging trust in the institutions of government as their leadership appears to prove institutional failure.
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Then noting that disjunctive Presidents tend to be judged to be ethically weaker than other types, even though that judgment may be very unfair to such Presidents. Ronald Reagan survived the scandals of his underlings as the "Teflon President", while Jimmy Carter seemed like a "Velcro President".
 
Disjunctive Presidents present themselves as political outsiders, offering technocratic excellence, and they are often detached from their parties. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter are obvious examples: a former mining engineer and a former nuclear engineer.

ML and BmC assessed those two Presidents.

HH deserves some credit for starting some New Deal programs, even if he was very cautious and reluctant to go very far, certainly not as far as FDR went.

JC: " his last two years, Carter clearly prioritized inflation over unemployment" - a common economically conservative policy: preserve the value of money even if doing so throws a lot of people out of work.

"This program presciently specified wage restraint as a cornerstone to aggressively tackle inflationary pressures but suffered because of organized labor’s lack of support (Biven 2002, 190-191; Dark 2001, 114-117)."

Indeed, despite the novelty assigned to Reagan’s later positions against ‘big government’, Carter and Gerald Ford before him had both started to address what they and economists identified as overly burdensome economic regulation and bureaucracy. Biven credits Carter’s airline deregulation as “one of the most important experiments” in economic policy of the era (2002, 222). However, the coalition fractured over Carter’s modest proposals to deregulate the oil industry. This plan met with fierce resistance from Carter’s own base as well as from liberal Democratic challenger Ted Kennedy, who by contrast promised to nationalize the industry completely (Anderson 2000). Unexpectedly, Carter’s deregulation efforts, not originally part of the anti-inflation strategy, were the most effective in reducing inflation. Other policies such as price guidelines and fiscal restraint had no real effect (Morgan 2004, 1023-1024).

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Congressional Reagan Democrats who became early converts to the new regime (Mikva 1990, 524). Furthermore, Carter’s push towards spending restraint in many areas of social policy created a platform for Reagan’s efforts.
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Reaganism before Reagan.
 
Carter also deregulated the beer industry in such a way that it fostered the later growth of microbreweries and craft beers, including all manner of IPAs, my favorite. So to me that was his greatest accomplishment. :beers:
 
Hoover’s presidency came as the development of radio as a major medium altered political communication. Hoover’s staid and sometimes dour persona compounded his appearance of inactivity and tied him in the public imagination with the tired laissez-faire regime of the old guard Republican Party (Clements 2010, 414-417; Jeansonne 2012, 389-390).
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Very unlike FDR's Fireside Chats.
The predominant narrative of the period (and then for some time in historical retrospect) was of Hoover the laissez-faire president, with press and historians alike branding the President as aloof and inactive in the face of national calamity (Leuchtenburg 2009, 104; Jeansonne 2013, 89).
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Jimmy Carter had the same problem with his "Crisis of Confidence" speech, often called his "Malaise" speech, even though he didn't use that word: Crisis of Confidence | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

The authors continue with "Constrained presidents have greater chance of achieving personal success in foreign policy." noting successes there, like JC's Israel-Egypt Camp David Accords, handover of the Panama Canal to Panama, and HH's Latin American diplomacy.

"Although Carter was frequently criticized as weak towards the Soviet Union, he ultimately heralded the transition from détente to confrontation."

Despite his successes, "... it was a photograph of the President being ‘attacked’ by a swamp rabbit near his home town that received the most enduring media attention for some months, reinforcing the narrative of an enfeebled president (Beinart 2010, 204-205; Berkowitz 2007, 122-125)."  Jimmy Carter rabbit incident
 
Disjunctive Presidents tend to have trouble working with their parties. "Hoover’s experimentation with intervention into the marketplace soon butted up against an unenthusiastic party."

"Ultimately Carter’s efforts undermined his own authority and fomented infighting within his administration."

"Whilst Hoover played a major role in resisting change and slowing the reform of the Republicans in the 1930s, Carter as the antecedent of the ‘New Democrat’ movement began the process of refocusing the party’s priorities and moving away from the faltering New Deal regime (Kaplowitz 1998)." - thus making him a predecessor of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.


One can ask how much individual Presidents do, and how much they are riding waves of political change, collective effects of the actions of many people. Presidents lend themselves to considering the Great Man theory of history, but Presidents do not rule alone - they need to win elections and they need underlings who are willing to do their bidding. Some of their underlings end up becoming architects of new regimes, like the New Dealers and the Reaganites.
 
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How does Donald Trump fit in? I think that he's the Mule of American politics.

The Mule is a character in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. He wrote that future-history series over the 1940's and the 1980's.

The Foundation series started as a series of stories that were published in "Astounding Science Fiction" magazine. Those ones were collected as the Foundation Trilogy in the early 1950's. In those stories, humanity had spread over our Galaxy, and when we start the series, all of humanity was ruled by a Galactic Empire that had lasted several thousand years. But a psychohistorian, Hari Seldon, discovered that the Empire will soon start to collapse, and if nothing is done, that that collapse will lead to some 30,000 years of chaos and barbarism. So he proposes a solution that will shorten that interregnum to about 1,000 years. The Empire puts him on trial for treason, and he accepts exile to a planet in the Galaxy's outer edge, Terminus. He and his followers then build the Foundation, nominally to assemble an Encyclopedia Galactica, but also to serve as the nucleus of the Second Galactic Empire. They also found the Second Foundation, at the "opposite end of the Galaxy", to watch over the growth of the Foundation's new Empire and fix anything that might go wrong with it.

In the first stories, we see the Foundation gradually get more and more influence over its neighbors, building a rival to the Galactic Empire. Every now and then is a "Seldon crisis", and every now and then, an animatronic version of Hari Seldon comes out of a vault to give advice.

But then the Mule emerges, and he builds a big galactic empire, disrupting the growth of the Foundation Empire and making Galactic history depart from Hari Seldon's calculations. After his defeat, the Second Foundation helps get the Foundation Empire back on track.
 
What makes him the Mule? He does not fit any of Stephen Skowronek's types very well.

He is a political outsider, someone with no previous experience in public-service leadership, whether elected office or civil administration or military command.  List of presidents of the United States by previous experience and  List of presidents of the United States by other offices held and  List of presidents of the United States by military service and  List of presidents of the United States by military rank

The previous disjunctive Presidents, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, ran as political outsiders with technocratic expertise, and Donald Trump did also, posing as a genius businessman.

There was a previous outsider Presidential candidate who was an actual businessman: Henry Ross Perot. After leaving the Navy in 1957, he became a salesman for IBM, then the world's biggest computer company. Computers back then were huge by present-day standards, and mostly used by government agencies and big businesses. After IBM management ignored his ideas much of the time, and after seeing how inefficiently the company's customers used many of their computers, he got an idea for a business. He left IBM and he founded Electronic Data Systems, a company that ran computers that would do computing for other companies and government agencies, thus having a nice division of labor. EDS's business was infrastructure as a service, IaaS, long before that acronym was invented. Similar is platform as a service, PaaS, software as a service, SaaS, and security as a service, SECaaS.
 
But unlike Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, Donald Trump dominates the Republican Party, to the extent that most elected Republicans are unwilling to criticize him in public.

Preemptive Presidents and President Trump – Presidential Power After describing reconstructing, articulating, and disjunctive Presidents, author Guy Barton notes
Preemptive presidents are similar to reconstructive presidents in that they seek to establish a new order. They therefore aim to govern differently to their predecessors. However, their fate is to find the order more robust than they anticipated, with the result that if they act too aggressively, they end up being sanctioned.
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Like John Tyler, whose cabinet resigned, and Woodrow Wilson, whose postwar international involvement was rejected by Congress, and impeached Presidents Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Dwight Eisenhower was another one, and some right-wingers believed him to be an agent of the international Communist conspiracy. Among them was Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society.
Trump looked to fit several of the criteria associated with preemptive presidents. He was an outsider, both to the Republican party which nominated him as well as the political system he was seeking to join. He had no previous political experience, which showed up in his stye: he was confrontation and aggressive towards his opponents; he employed social media effectively to cut through to his supporters, many of them white working-class Americans who felt left behind by the economic globalization of the 1980s and 1990s and by the global financial crisis of 2008-09.

Following his election, Trump continued in his outsider status. Whereas previous presidents had all employed persuasion as a central feature of the job, Trump instead rejected the need for negotiation and sought to rule by fiat. He broke with previous consensus on immigration and asylum and in foreign policy. He went beyond the inconvenient truth that the US works with autocratic governments to embrace strongmen, from Vladimir Putin to Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Kim Jong-Il. He continued to use his Twitter account to break news and reach his base. He refused to condemn white nationalist and racist sentiment among his supporters. He lied shamelessly and extravagantly and rejected developments which were inconvenient to him, like climate change or the covid19 pandemic. And like Johnson and Nixon before him, he was also impeached.
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Though he ended up dominating the Republican Party, the Republican establishment did not protest because it got much of what it wanted.
That included tax cuts, the gutting of his predecessor’s healthcare system and the appointment of three conservative justices to the Supreme Court.
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"That Trump cannot be wholly categorised as a preemptive president is in line with present thinking in presidential studies."
noting
Presidential Leadership and the Trump Presidency: Executive Power and Democratic Government | SpringerLink
Demonstrates how the Trump presidency differs from any preceding administration

Explores the authoritarian themes that have emerged under Trump's leadership and how to counter them

Addresses the concept of presidential lies and how it has characterized much of Trump's rhetoric
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The authors, writing on Dec 14, 2020, then state "The next president, Joe Biden, is likely to revert to the norm, given his long experience in Congress and as a Washington insider." Not to mention Barack Obama's Vice President. That has turned out to be essentially correct. He has governed much like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, though he has been a little bit more progressive than those three.
 
Donald Trump as The Mule - it turns out that I am not alone.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat: Is Trump an Agent or an Accident of History? | American Enterprise Institute - AEI also at Is Trump an agent or an accident of history? | The Seattle Times
Was there a more normal, conventional, stable-seeming timeline for 21st century American politics that Trump, with his unique blend of tabloid celebrity, reality-TV charisma, personal shamelessness and demagogic intuition, somehow wrenched us off?

Or is Trump just an American expression of the trends that have revived nationalism all over the world, precisely the sort of figure a “psychohistory” of our era would have anticipated?
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Then discussing using the 14th Amendment against him.
This shift doesn’t mean, however, that I am immune to the arguments that still treat Trump as unique, even Mule-ish, with a capacity for chaos unequaled by any other populist. You can see this distinctiveness in the failures of various Republican candidates who have tried to ape his style. And you can reasonably doubt that a different populist would have gone all the way to the disgrace of Jan. 6, 2021 — or inspired as many followers.
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He doesn't really address this issue, however.

Most other Republican politicians would likely be some more typical disjunctive President, trying to keep Gilded Age II neoliberalism going for a little bit longer despite its failures, moving toward departures from that platform, and seeming totally ineffective.
 
Quora has some comparisons between The Mule and Donald Trump:
The Mule and Donald Trump have very different personalities, and Donald Trump lacks The Mule's psychic powers as far as anyone can tell, but their being disruptive is very similar: the usual course of US politics vs. the Seldon Plan.

Isaac Asimov, Psychohistory, & the Trump Phenomenon
In the books, four of the five crises come to pass and dealt with successfully with Seldon's instructions left to future generations. The last crisis took a different path via a mutant being (The Mule aka Donald Trump) with his astonishing mind control abilities on large populations who he converted into loyal followers. Sound familiar? That's exactly what Trump has been doing by gaslighting individuals and outright lying using social media to influence those predisposed to his ahborent, nationalist behavior.
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Then mentioning the Second Foundation and its correcting the development of the Foundation Empire after the defeat of the Mule.
The parallels are astonishing. But who or what exactly did America's Founding Fathers envision for our Second Foundation, the saviors of the world? Only time will tell. But I suspect that there is an individual or group of people out there who are configuring ways as I write this to fix what is broken, overcome our differences, and plot a path to civility and greatness once again. And something tells me that their names might be Bezos, Gates, Cook, and Buffett.
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I don't think that we should expect *any* savior. I remember what happened with Barack Obama. What one should do instead is build a movement for progressive change. Some leaders may emerge, but one should not expect some big overall leader. That's what happened with the numerous activist movements that the US has had. The Founders were more than George Washington. The antislavery movement was not Abraham Lincoln. The Progressive-Era movements were much more than Teddy Roosevelt. The New-Deal-Era labor movements were not FDR. The Sixties-Era activism movements were much more than LBJ. Some prominent leaders may emerge, but the movements were much more than those leaders. The black civil-rights movement of 1955 - 1965 was much more than Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance.

That is as true of the Right as it is of the Left. White supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan had no big overall leader. The John Birch Society is much more than its founder, Robert Welch. The Tea Party had no big overall leader, and QAnon doesn't either. The far right now has a personality cult of Donald Trump, but it is still more than him.
 
The Mule and His Very Big Nuclear Button - 07/Jan/2018 - "Trump is the proverbial black swan which was not anticipated – a low probability, high-impact presence which is disrupting American politics, its alliance systems and its governance structures."

Also at The mule and his very big nuclear button

"Donald J. Trump could well end up as a modern-day Attila or Chengiz, who changed the world through their acts of wanton destruction."

The Roman Empire had to fight off Attila's armies, but Attila left no lasting legacy. Genghis Khan and his successors built an empire that ruled much of Eurasia between Belarus and Korea, but it also did not last long.

Author Manoj Joshi continued
Given the sheer magnitude of its power, the US has weathered massive setbacks like the “three trillion dollar war” of choice in Iraq and the 2008 financial meltdown. But the Trump effect is wilful and more pervasive. Beginning with his two benign neighbours, he has undermined the strong system of friends and allies that the US had around the world. By pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he knocked the legs off any viable strategy of standing up to China in what he now terms the “Indo-Pacific.”

He disdains multilateral trade rules and has surrendered American leadership in the issue of the day, climate change. He wants to cut the American foreign assistance budget for 2018 by nearly $12 billion, putting paid to any plan to counter China’s belt and road initiative. And the $11.1 billion cut in the R&D budget flies in the face of the $20 billion per annum that Beijing is putting into just one area, artificial intelligence. The crowning blunder is restriction of immigration which has given America its science and technology sinews. Last year, all six American Nobel Prize winners were immigrants and since 2016, fully 40% came to the US from other countries.
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The author then asks if Trump is mentally sound. "His bouts of slurring, instances of using two hands to drink water off a glass and his intemperate tweets, the latest about the size of his nuclear button, are alarming."
 
There is a broader problem with the US Presidency: putting too much power in the hands of one individual. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote about this problem in 1973:  The Imperial Presidency - about  Imperial presidency more generally.

But what makes a strong democracy? Surprising as it may seem to some people, it's a strong legislature or ruling council.

This is a consequence of the research of Steven Fish and his collaborators, first looking at post-Soviet countries, and then more generally.

Stronger Legislatures, Stronger Democracies | Journal of Democracy
also at
1. Fish pp 5-20.pmd - fish_steven_-_stronger_legislatures_stronger_democracy_-_en_-_standards.pdf (PDF file online)

He and Matthew Kroenig have composed a 32-item Parliamentary Powers Index. Several of these powers are powers of the legislature over the executive branch: oversight, appointment of officials, outright supremacy, etc.

Supremacy? Like this:
8. The country lacks a presidency entirely; or there is a presidency, but the president is elected by the legislature.

The legislature is actively at work:
27. The legislature is regularly in session.

The legislators have assistants:
28. Each legislator has a personal secretary.
29. Each legislator has at least one nonsecretarial staff member with policy expertise.

Legislative term limits are bad:
30. Legislators are eligible for reelection without any restriction.
31. A seat in the legislature is an attractive enough position that legislators are generally interested in and seek reelection.
32. The reelection of incumbent legislators is common enough that at any given time the legislature contains a significant number of highly experienced members.
 
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