If you want to review how we got here, these were the previous posts in “The Worst President Ever?”: Part I, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and a month ago, Part 6. Right now, the final field stands at eight, which is more than I wanted and a number that surprised me, especially since I disqualified one of the conventional wisdom favorites for Bad President infamy, Warren G. Harding. But poor Harding only was President for 2 and a half years, dying of a heart attack in August of 1923. He still had some good moments, and what he has always been marked down for is scandals in his cabinet that didn’t come to light until after he died. Like the other Presidents who didn’t serve a full term (W.H. Harrison, Taylor, Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Andrew Johnson and Gerald Ford), Harding never had a fair chance to distinguish himself (although Chester A. Arthur managed to do well in fewer than four years), so I felt it wasn’t ethical to include Warren in the Presidential Hall of Shame.

With that calculation, I realize that the field of eight must in fairness be reduced to seven. As I just mentioned, Andrew Johnson is one of the Presidents who didn’t get the opportunity to serve a full term. Yes, he only missed 41 days, but as the ghost of any President will tell you, a lot can happen in 41 days, good and bad. I think I may have been biased by the fact that when I first began studying the U.S. Presidency, literally everyone was taught that of course Johnson was the worst President: after all, he was the only President who was impeached! John Fitzgerald Kennedy while Senator helped the public understand that the impeachment was not as damning as widely believed by making Edmund Ross, the Republican Senator from Kansas who saved Johnson from conviction, one of his “Profiles in Courage”; still the stain of impeachment by the House hung like a black cloud over the first President Johnson. That cloud began dispersing a bit when Richard Nixon had to resign, a bit more after Bill Clinton was impeached (on stronger grounds than Johnson) and beat the rap as well as managing to remain a rock star in his party until that sexual predator thingy belatedly caught up with him. Then Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats managed to eliminate impeachment as a brand of disgrace by abusing the process with two purely partisan impeachments during Donald Trump’s first term. Johnson’s impeachment doesn’t look so damning now, and he didn’t get a full term in office. I am revoking his selection as a candidate for The Worst President.

I suppose it is a bit silly to lay out the criteria for the grand prize at the end of this inquiry rather than the beginning, but I need them more at this point than I did to make the first cuts. I used five categories in the finals.

Category I is how the President handled the “King” component of the job. Did he meet the traditional American template for a President as established by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the original icons? Did he leave the office itself stronger or weaker after his term or terms were over? To a great extent this part of the job is theater and keeping up appearances, but no competent leader would deny that this is a critical aspect of leading anything, especially a nation. A President’s popularity counts in this category.

Category Two is made up of the positive results for which a President can take legitimate credit. Leadership is one of those unfortunate jobs in which moral luck can make you a success or a failure, and that’s not fair, but it’s still the conditions that prevail. No leader gets credit for making brilliant decisions that all turn sour. Trying hard also doesn’t count. With Presidents, Yoda’s standard is the right one.

The third category contains the accumulated black marks, all the bad decisions, non-decisions, missteps and mistakes that a President made, and the damage they did, short and long term. Categories Two and Three offset each other to a considerable extent: if Category Two is impressive enough, a President can survive debacles in Category Three that would sink the historical assessment of a less successful one. The ultimate example of this tension is Franklin Delano Roosevelt‘s Presidency, as I have mentioned on EA many times. Roosevelt is almost unanimously regarded as one of out greatest Presidents because he probably saved the United States from collapse during the Great Depression and led the nation to victory over Hitler’s Germany and Japan in World War II. Those were existential achievements, and they were substantially the results of FDR’s remarkable skill as a leader. All of his black marks, and he earned as many as any President, still fade to insignificance in comparison.

Category Four is character, because it matters in a leader. Category Five applies the test of whether a President had a genuine opportunity to shine, or if circumstances largely outside of his control during his time in the White House made it virtually impossible for anyone but a great leader—maybe—to avoid a failed Presidency.

To be selected as the Worst President Ever, that POTUS must be shown to be deficient in Categories One and Four, as well as have the failures of Category Three outweigh the successes of Category One. Category Five, finally, must show them with at least a realistic chance of success. I’m not going to employ any fake system that involves using numbers or scores to make what is still a subjective process look scientific. These are my assessments, and anyone is welcome to weighing the factors differently.

I will begin by whittling the field of seven to five using entirely the Category Five criteria: Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan cannot be judged as the worst of the worst. Both were President as the issue of slavery was tearing the nation apart, and whatever their achievements might have been in other areas, their main assignment was to stop the growing momentum toward either the dissolution of the Union or a civil war. A towering leader might have had a chance to pull this off, a Washington, Jackson or Lincoln, but even that is speculation and wishful thinking.

Pierce entered the White House a broken man; Buchanan was a lifetime bureaucrat with little talent for leadership at all, but both were in the same impossible position: in Rudyard Kipling’s terms, all about them were losing their heads and blaming it on them. Pierce and Buchanan were flops, but if we consulted those Presidential ghosts again via seance and asked them, “Honestly now, do you think you could have done any better?,” I think most if not all of them would answer, “Probably not.”

That leaves Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Joe Biden. Next off the list has to be the recently departed and excessively lauded Jimmy Carter. He had opportunities to be a great President, but he never understood the office. Like Herbert Hoover, another prominent omission from the field, Carter was a micromanager who always thought he was the smartest one in the room. He was on the whole a failure who projected American weakness and diminished the office by his deliberately unimpressive presence. He was also unlucky: had his attempted rescue mission of the Iranian hostages not been foiled by tiny desert windstorms called haboobs, Carter might have won a second term. He may not be the best of the remaining group, but he is most clearly not the worst. Carter also gets points on the character scale, Category 4. He may not have made good on his promise never to lie to the public, but he came closer to that ideal than most.

Next off the board has to be the much reviled Richard Nixon, before Trump the President who most had to battle the news media and the opposing party while in office. Tricky Dick was not very good at being “King” because he had negative charisma, but few Presidents have had his combination of intelligence and mastery of the office. The fact that George McGovern was a terrible selection by the Democrats to run against him in 1972 was only part of the reason for Nixon’s landslide: he was, correctly, viewed as a skillful President, and up to that point, a successful one. Just as FDR’s bad decisions as President prevent him from being judged the greatest POTUS of all, Nixon’s many substantial accomplishments as President keep him from being a rational choice as the worst. The Watergate scandal did terrible damage to the office, but not enough, in my analysis, to make Richard Milhous Nixon the Worst President Ever.

And then there were four. If Nixon goes, Bill Clinton has to be cut from the herd too. He flopped the character test as badly as any President we have ever had, while having the natural presence and charisma that are essential to the King segment of the job. Clinton demonstrated skill at the job of being President once he figured it out, and was the beneficiary of the dotcom boom, allowing him to be the only President in modern history to avoid a budget deficit. His sin is that of wasted opportunity and potential, for he had the skills to be a great and unifying President and instead was a divisive one. He’s one of my least favorite Presidents, but he’s not the worst.

We’re down to just three now, Woodrow Wilson, George W. Bush and Joe Biden. I don’t see how Bush II can compete with the other two. The Iraq War was an avoidable mess, and the economic crash of 2008 was on Bush’s watch: that two major strikes against him. Nor was Bush especially skilled at playing President, being a mush-mouth with minimal speaking skills and even less presence than his father. His administration was hijacked by the 9-11 attacks, however, and he handled that crisis well. He also gets credit for not hesitating to strike back at Afghanistan. W. was, I have always believed, over his head in the White House; nonetheless he kept terrorism at bay and gets some tiny credit for trying to address the illegal immigration problem, though he was undermined by his own party. I don’t think history will be kind to him, but if not selecting Bush II as the Worst President Ever is kindness, well, I’ll be kind.

And so here we are. Our final choice is between Woodrow Wilson, a two-term President who was long ranked by the overwhelmingly left-leaning, Democrat-favoring historian establishment as one of our greatest Presidents, and Joe Biden, now finishing up a disastrous single term with almost daily added gaffes and embarrassments. The two men could hardly be more different.

Wilson was one of our most intelligent and learned Presidents, a government scholar who came to politics from academia. Biden, in contrast, may be the dimmest bulb ever to try to shine in the White House: he makes Harry Truman look like Winston Churchill. Wilson had two terms (well, almost) and Biden had one, if you think he was really acting as President for four years, which is increasingly in doubt. A President with two terms has more opportunities to accomplish things, and also has more time to make bad decisions.

The major similarity Wilson and Biden share is being disabled and attempting to hide it from the public. Wilson’s disability was more serious than Biden’s, as he had a debilitating stroke more than a year from the end of his second term, but Biden’s disability, most now believe, has been progressive and was in evidence to close family members and associates (and members of the press) before he was even elected. Both Biden and Wilson had wives who were determined to keep the real conditions of their husbands from the public, though Edith Wilson’s was the more egregious deception, as she and Wilson’s doctor secretly served as Presidential surrogates for more than a year.

Biden was definitely complicit in his outrageous and unconstitutional deception; the extent to which Wilson was is open to dispute. Considering his massive ego (and they say Trump is a narcissist!), it is quite conceivable that Wilson was convinced that even with his brain damaged, he was more capable of being President than his Vice-President, an early version of Mike Pence named Thomas Marshall. Wilson couldn’t stand him and barely spoke with him even before his stroke. It is also quite conceivable that Wilson was right about their relative abilities.

I will use the five categories to settle whether Wilson or Biden gets the Worst President Ever distinction.

Category One is an easy win for Wilson (which in terms of getting the WPE prize, is a loss). He played President well, though he was aloof and not especially likable. He was a competent speaker, unlike Biden, and radiated competence and intellect, unlike Biden. His last year in office didn’t diminish the image of the Presidency thanks to the lack of mass media, while Biden’s stumbling, mumbling, bumbling version of the Presidency seriously damaged the brand, possibly beyond recovery.

Category Two also goes to Wilson; it’s really no contest. He had substantive and lasting accomplishments in his first term, which is how he managed to be ranked among the best Presidents for so long. These included labor reforms like the Eight Hour Law for Women of the District of Columbia, the Seaman’s Act, Workmen’s Compensation for Federal employees, the Federal Child Labor Bill, and more. At a time when the abuse of workers by Big Business was epidemic, Wilson supported workers organizing into unions. He championed the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 which established the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and halt unfair and illegal business practices. He helped create the Federal Reserve System as well as many other reforms. Wilson also has to be given credit for the good deeds of the United Nations, the successor to his ill-fated League of Nations. The U.N. is almost useless now, but during the Cold War and especially the Cuban Missile Crisis, it may well have saved humanity from World War III. Give credit where credit is due: without Wilson, there may have never been a U.N. when we needed one.

Biden’s major positive accomplishment was signing a long over-due transportation infrastructure bill. His various climate change actions were expensive virtue-signaling: they didn’t, and couldn’t, put a dent in climate change. The electric car edicts were nonsense; Biden’s administration’s obsession with DEI policies will look as absurd as they are in a few years if not months.

It’s in Category Three that the argument for Wilson as the Worst President Ever must rest. He’s the mirror image of FDR: Wilson’s bad acts are so bad that they overwhelm the many substantial good ones. He won election as a peace-keeper who “kept is out of the war,” and a mere month after being sworn in for a second term, he pushed us into a war that the United States had no business being involved in. 63,114 U.S. soldiers died overseas from accidents and disease, and another 53,402 on the battlefields. No benefits were achieved for our nation from all this destruction, but the war did leave a mass of spiritual devastation here in its wake.

Our infected soldiers also were substantially responsible for turning the Spanish Flu, which probably originated in the U.S., into a world pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million people. After the war, Wilson’s obsession with his dream project of an international organization to prevent future wars prompted him into allowing the victorious powers in Europe inflict a punitive treaty on Germany that planted the seeds of Adolf Hitler’s rise and a second world war that was far more deadly than the first. Wilson got his League of Nations, but he couldn’t persuade Congress to let the U.S. join it.

Let’s see, two world wars and a worldwide epidemic….what other flaming bags of poo can we leave on Wilson’s doorstep? A proud racist, Wilson super-charged Jim Crow and turned back efforts by Teddy Roosevelt and President Taft to integrate the federal workforce. Biden encouraged discrimination against white men; Wilson promoted discrimination against blacks. Wilson also qualifies as a foe of free speech, imprisoning anti-war protesters including one of his political adversaries, Socialist Eugene V. Debs.

Biden inflicted a lot of harm on the U.S. with his indefensible illegal immigration policies, his DEI obsession, his prosecution of Donald Trump, his toothless foreign policies, his disastrous retreat from Afghanistan, and his profligate spending. Then there are the family scandals, his unprecedented public vilification of his political opponents, his administration’s efforts to censor political speech, aka “misinformation,”and the humiliating handling of his re-election attempt. It is difficult, however, to beat Wilson’s legacy of two world wars, a worldwide pandemic, racist government policies and the violation of Constitutional rights.

I have to rate Category Four as a wash. I read several biographies of Wilson without grasping a deep understanding of what he was like as a human being. We know he was stubborn, arrogant, intolerant and demanding, with the conviction that he knew better than anyone how to be President and what was in the best interests of the U.S. in the world. That is not too different from the standard Presidential personality. Biden’s character is a matter of dispute, and since it is clear that he has been manipulated and not at full mental acuity as President, it seems unfair to judge his character based on his conduct in a diminished state….and he was no Woodrow Wilson even at his peak.

As for Category Five: Did Wilson and Biden have sufficient opportunities to be “great”? Sure they did. Wilson had a foreign war to deal with, a labor movement, women’s rights activism and a civil right movement that he effectively derailed. Biden had two foreign wars, risking a nuclear conflict in one and priming an outbreak of anti-Semitism with his feckless handling of the other. Both operated in environments of intense political opposition, and both resorted to using the law to harass opponents while trying to censor free speech. Biden had a still-raging pandemic to handle, a deepening of racial distrust after the George Floyd Freakout and Black Lives Matter riots, and the job of building back the economy after we had foolishly wrecked it with the lockdown.

I can’t put off the final decision any longer.

Sorry, Woody, but Joe Biden has to get the title of the Worst President Ever. Wilson did more harm in his two terms than Joe did in his one, but Wilson also was undeniably President for seven of his eight years, and I have real doubts whether Joe Biden was really President for any of his four. As a matter of fealty to democratic principles, that we have gone through four years without knowing who was really running the country is frightening. Under Biden and because of Biden’s limitations, the United States government has come closer to totalitarianism than ever before in its history. The Presidency has been diminished; public trust in our system of government is at low tide.

Biden didn’t kill as many people as Woodrow Wilson did, but he did infinitely more harm to democracy and our democratic values. Add to those failures the undeniable fact that when Wilson wasn’t getting black men lynched and getting soldiers killed for nothing, he was a skilled leader who accomplished some important reforms….and his world organization idea just may have saved everyone.

I began this inquiry certain that Wilson would lap the field. In the end, the contest was very close, but the key point is this: Woodrow Wilson had many successes and innovative policies that somewhat mitigate his terrible legacy. Joe Biden does not.

Joe Biden is the Worst President Ever.