AMAC Exclusive – By Shane Harris
The annual President’s Day presidential ranking from the self-proclaimed “experts” at the American Political Science Association (APSA) has long been a largely political endeavor designed to smear the legacy of conservatives and wash over the failures of liberals. But this year’s iteration was particularly egregious by any objective metric – ranking Joe Biden 14th, above figures like Ronald Reagan and Ulysses Grant, and Donald Trump dead last, below notorious failures James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson.
As intended, the rankings created plenty of headline material for the corporate press.
“Presidential experts rank Biden 14th among presidents in survey, Trump comes in last,” proclaimed The Hill. “Poll ranks Biden as 14th-best president, with Trump last,” touted The New York Times. NPR, Newsweek, The LA Times, Axios, and The Independent all ran virtually identical headlines.
It is difficult to choose whether Biden or Trump’s ranking is more ridiculous.
Biden, despite implementing policies which caused 40-year high inflation and multiple foreign disasters, is ranked ahead of Reagan, who won the Cold War and ushered in a historically great period of economic prosperity, and U.S. Grant, who established the Department of Justice, snuffed out the first version of the Ku Klux Klan, and did more than any other president to mend the wounds of the Civil War.
Meanwhile, Trump, despite creating an economic boom that rivaled even the Reagan years, becoming the first president this century to not lead the U.S. into any new wars, holding Russia and China in check, and a host of other accomplishments, is ranked below James Buchanan, who is widely viewed as aggravating tensions which led directly to the Civil War.
The survey contains plenty of other things to quibble about as well. One of the most obvious is the fact that Franklin D. Roosevelt is now ranked second, wedged between Abraham Lincoln at number one and George Washington at number three. Despite all the recent talk about historical “reckonings,” it seems, FDR still gets a pass for being a notorious racist, worsening the Great Depression through his “New Deal,” shattering Washington’s precedent of only seeking two terms, and attempting to pack the Supreme Court.
But as Noah Rothman points out in a piece for National Review, “It seems that the point of this exercise wasn’t an objective assessment of American presidential legacies. It was to convey to the list’s readers that Donald Trump is bad.”
Many of those readers will be college students in freshman political science courses, eagerly listening on as their professors – some of whom contributed to the rankings – explain that because the APSA says Donald Trump is terrible, it must be true.
This will be just the beginning of their indoctrination. Over the next four years they will be inundated with propaganda about how conservative ideas never work and progressivism has never failed. Anyone who dares to suggest that Trump’s actual governing record proves he is perhaps the most successful first-term president in history risks a failing grade and a referral to the school’s DEI office.
Of course, academia smearing a successful conservative president is nothing new. In 1996, renowned (liberal) historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ranked Reagan 26th on his list of presidents. Four years earlier, Justin Kaplan, editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, refused to include any famous quotes from Reagan, nicknamed “The Great Communicator,” in the publication’s 16th edition. Thus began the still-ongoing effort by the “expert class” to erode Reagan’s legacy.
Attempts to rewrite history are bad enough on their own. But this round of biased rankings is especially dangerous because, for the first time since APSA began ranking presidents, two men on that list will be facing off against one another in an election.
With the November contest less than nine months away, the rankings list has become just one more useful tool for the media to claim that Joe Biden is an objectively better option than Donald Trump, and that, despite what your own memory may tell you, the Trump years truly were terrible.
This can and should be seen as a coordinated effort by academia and the media to swing the election to Joe Biden. While a growing segment of the population which understands the corrupt game the left is playing will correctly laugh off these hopelessly biased rankings, it is also worth considering that this strategy is what allowed the left to elevate one of the weakest candidates in American history to the White House four years ago.
The APSA’s rankings are hardly the only cultural tradition that has become debased by “Trump derangement syndrome” and a vicious hatred of conservatism. Awards shows like the Grammys and the Academy Awards have now become little more than a stage for Hollywood elites to bash conservatives. Meanwhile, films and music are now judged by critics (supposed “experts” in their field) solely based on how well they adhere to left-wing social politics.
That’s not even to mention late night shows and network television, which are now megaphones for Democrat Party talking points. Even the Super Bowl and other major sporting events have become platforms to advance cultural leftism – a phenomenon which began, uncoincidentally, during the Trump years as another way for the left to thumb their nose at the president.
Academia, media, medicine, sports, entertainment – all of these industries have been under the ideological control of the left for decades, but it is the left’s insatiable desire to “get Trump” that has revealed how truly corrupt the whole system is.
In 2020, it was the “experts” who assured us via the media that Trump’s COVID-19 policies were responsible for every death from the virus. The “experts” told us that Joe Biden was in perfect physical and mental condition and it was Donald Trump who was in bad health (who can forget the weeklong media frenzy over Trump walking slowly down a ramp?), that Trump was a “threat to democracy,” and that Joe Biden, the expert diplomat, would bring about fewer wars and conflicts around the world.
In each case the “experts” have been proven exactly wrong. But no matter – they succeeded in advancing their ideological agenda, at the cost of politicizing their profession and permanently tainting their credibility.
The APSA long ago sacrificed its integrity in pursuit of politics. Its latest presidential ranking only makes this even more evident.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on Twitter @ShaneHarris513.
