President Trump is still within the first critical phase of his presidency, and there is already solid evidence that he will rank better than Obama in the ratings…
Recently, analysts released the 2018 Presidents and Executive Politics Presidential Greatness Survey. It was based on 170 usable responses from current and former members of the American Political Science Association’s presidents and executive politics section. They ranked Trump dead last, which seemed like the most important part of this headline-grabbing exercise.
As an historian I’ve had experience ranking presidential historians with much more rigor than this exercise, and I find that Trump deserves a different ranking.
This survey relied on a rather vague and flawed methodology. The survey asked the presidential experts to use a 0-100 scale “for overall greatness,” with zero being failure, 50 being average and 100 being great. This doesn’t ask for any specific metrics that might make a president great. What legislation did he shepherd through Congress? What obstacles did he overcome? How do they weigh intangible factors like their Twitter account or feuds with the media?
The survey doesn’t ask for anything specific, just how generally people feel about Trump. As I’ve assessed his actions over the past year, I’m more and more convinced that his Twitter basically trolls the left and it’s more important to consider his policies and essentially ignore the noise coming from Twitter.
On top of basically gauging the gut feeling of many random people with no methodological controls, the respondents were heavily weighted democrats. Roughly 57 percent were Democrats, 13 percent were Republicans and 27 percent were independents. This is heavily skewed towards Democrats, as Pew Research reported that the country is 48 percent Democrat or lean Democratic, and 44 percent lean or vote Republican. Yet this survey adds 10 percent Democrats and lowers Republican representation by 20 percent for a 30-point swing.
Not too long ago I ranked Obama’s greatness for OpsLens readers using a much stronger methodology. I looked at the foreign and domestic policy accomplishments in the first two years, and particularly the first six months. Then I took those achievements and stripped away the hot air, rhetoric, and spin to determine how successful they were. For example, here in Nevada, Republicans won more state offices than any time since it became a state during the US Civil War in 1864. None of the Democrats ran on Obamacare, but the attorney general (who is now running for governor) and many of the Republicans did. Because of that and many other examples, I concluded that his stimulus, health plan, and foreign policy were largely ineffective and mediocre at best.
Already I’ve provided more detail than the vague feelings of biased, click-bait garbage from the Greatness Survey. Trump hasn’t been through two years yet, but we can assess some of his major policy achievements.
In both the tax plan and the reduction of regulation, he has helped the economy grow a significant degree. Paul Ryan in fact got in trouble for touting one its smaller benefits. But the way to cut through the spin is to see how eager politicians are to run on it. True disasters like Obamacare become radioactive, but the tax plan is well received among most Republicans and regularly part of their stump speech. Many Republicans are retiring, which does suggests that Trump’s antics have provided significant head wind to at least some Republicans.
President Trump is still within the first critical phase of his presidency, and there is already solid evidence that he will rank better than Obama in the ratings! But there is still much more of his first term and a potential second term as well as additional legislation to judge. It is incredibly premature to judge Trump’s presidency, and it this survey seems like little more than a shallow, biased, attempt of elites to communicate their hatred and contempt of Trump’s presidency and the voters that put him in office.
