This historian seems to think so.
Naftali presents a strong case for Trump being the worst despite there being a lot of competition for the all-time worst president. In addition to being a history professor, he used to work for the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, and therefore he knows quite a bit about Nixon as a result. Nixon might be the closest president to Trump in terms of being the worst, but Nixon was smart and did have some administrative and leadership abilities, two things Trump completely lacks.
In the above-linked article, Naftali looks at various presidents starting with Harding, who made the initial worst of the early "worst" lists compiled by the Schlesinger father-and-son historians. Harding's reputation has gone up just a bit, not because he was a better president than previously thought, but because there were presidents who were so much worse, namely those immediately preceding and succeeding Abraham Lincoln. Those three presidents--Pierce, Buchanan, and Andrew Johnson--were little more than traitors to the United States in their support for the confederacy and the existence of slavery. Naftali goes into more detail about these three failures' policies than I am going to do.
Other presidents like Woodrow Wilson have taken a bit of a hit in recent decades because of racist attitudes, while others like Bush II, although mediocre and iffy on his foreign policy, weren't the absolute worst.
In the end, the worst president comes down to just two, Trump and Nixon, at least in my view. Naftali presents their shortcomings in all their dubious glory. Nixon, though, did something truly evil in my book which can never whitewashed, and that is his entire presidency was based on a coverup. This coverup was to hide his violation of the Logan Act when, as a private citizen running for the presidency in 1968, he, through third parties, sabotaged the Paris Peace Accords, the so-called Chennault Affair. He did it because he thought LBJ, who was trying to end the Vietnam War after he realized the Tet Offensive was a complete failure, was playing politics with the accords so he could help Hubert Humphrey in the fall elections. However, this was not true according to the LBJ tapes. LBJ thought Nixon would win, and he was horrified to find out Nixon indeed committed what he termed "treason" against the United States. LBJ had the dirt on Nixon, and Nixon knew this and was afraid of exposure. He spent his entire presidency in fear of being exposed; hence, Watergate and all the rest of the illegal activities he committed. After LBJ died early in 1973, Nixon became more paranoid and wanted to find where the files implicating him were, but those files were in Texas, far away from D.C. in safe keeping by LBJ associate Walt Rostow. LBJ trusted him enough to keep them far, far away from Nixon. The content of those files was kept confidential for many years, but after they were released, historians have had to completely rewrite the history of the Vietnam War, LBJ, and Nixon.
What was really bad, though, was that Nixon stretched that war out four years longer than it needed to be, thus costing hundreds of thousands of lives in southeast Asia. Those war victims, including many U.S. military, died just so that Nixon could get elected and then re-elected. Then, just before the 1972 elections, Nixon and Kissinger hammered out a peace agreement that was nearly identical to the one LBJ worked on four years earlier.
Nixon resigned rather than be impeached over his conduct in the Watergate scandal, which in retrospect ties in closely with the Chennault Affair, but he should have been tried at The Hague for his war crimes instead.
It is very tough for any president to exceed the evil Nixon did, and I am not sure Trump is in fact worse. Watergate and Vietnam damaged the United States for decades, and still have a negative effect on politics today. It is difficult to overstate how divisive both were to the country. I think one has to live through the era to appreciate the negative ramifications.
Trump committed three major presidential sins in Naftali's view. The first stems from his ties to Russia and his support of Russia and other totalitarian regimes, a direct assault on this country's national security. The second stems from Trump's incompetence and indifference to COVID-19, which has infected millions of people and caused over 400,000 deaths. However, as Naftali notes, other presidents like Wilson and Reagan were also inept or indifferent to major diseases unleashed on the country (Spanish flu and AIDS), so Trump isn't unique here. The third sin may be the most damaging, and that, of course is Trump instigating an insurrection against the U.S. Capitol and thus against the United States government, something no president, not even Nixon, would have ever dreamed of doing. What Trump did was undercut the Constitution of the United States, the very foundation of our country. It remains to be seen what the long range impact of Trump's actions would be.
It might be a photo finish as to whether Nixon or Trump is worse, but I still say Nixon by just a whisker. Both could share the bottom spot of presidential rankings.
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