Just when you think you’ve seen it all, the legacy media sink to a new low. This week, in honor of Presidents Day, liberal media outlets decided to parrot a bizarre survey from left-wing academics and unironically claim that Donald Trump was the very worst president in United States history.
Yes, seriously. (The survey also somehow ranked Joe Biden as the 14th-best president of all time, which seems generous.) The “analysis” was conducted by the “Presidential Greatness Project,” and it surveyed 154 “social science experts” to come up with its rankings.
Media outlets from MSNBC to the New York Times to Rolling Stone and even the U.K.-based newspaper the Guardian all ran stories echoing this survey result and claiming, with a straight face, that Trump is the worst president ever.
Whether you like Trump or hate him, anyone with an ounce of critical thinking skills should be able to see how absurd this notion actually is. Even if you take the most critical light of Trump’s presidency and believe that he mishandled COVID-19 and incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, eminently debatable points, that’s still nowhere near as bad as many things other presidents did while in office.
Consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom the analysis bizarrely ranks as the second-best president ever, second only to Abraham Lincoln. After the attacks on Pearl Harbor, FDR famously rounded up roughly 120,000 Japanese (or just Asian-looking) people and put them into internment camps. About two-thirds of the people he targeted were U.S. citizens, for goodness’ sake!
It’s hard to imagine a more authoritarian, racist, and monstrous act, let alone identify anything Trump ever did that comes anywhere close in comparison.
Or consider Andrew Jackson, America’s seventh president, who infamously perpetuated the “Trail of Tears,” in which nearly 100,000 Native Americans were forcibly removed from their homelands and driven across the country, an atrocity resulting in at least 3,000 deaths. What, exactly, did Trump ever do that’s on par with that?
Quite obviously, nothing even comes close. So, for anyone to rank him as the worst president ever requires an astounding degree of ignorance and/or delusion.
And that’s one reason this is concerning. It’s yet more evidence of the extreme ideological bias that has academia in a death grip. The academy’s job is to pursue truth and knowledge, yet it simply cannot do that while trapped in a far-left echo chamber.
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Secondly, this saga is yet another reminder of the legacy media’s bizarre willingness to stoop to any low to attack Trump. They don’t seem to realize that uncritically embracing the most absurd criticisms of the former president discredits them when they do raise valid critiques.
So, the next time that academics and journalists are feeling frustrated that the public no longer trusts them, they need to look in the mirror and reflect on how they destroyed their credibility in the first place.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and Washington Examiner contributor.