Presidential Greatness Project survey of 154 academics places him below Buchanan
Trump posted the rankings on Truth Social last Thursday, separating 45 US presidents into six tiers stretching from “greatest” to “failures” and placing himself alone at the summit. The image grouped Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and George Washington in a “great” category beneath him; Theodore Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland, who each served nonconsecutive terms, were classified as “near great.”
A closer look reveals the post was retrofitted to older scholarship. The image appears to have been adapted from a 1948 Life magazine article by the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr that posed the question “what makes a president great or a failure” — a publication date that explains why Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and both Presidents Bush are absent. The original layout did not contain a “greatest” category, and someone has since added one. Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama were inserted in the “failures” tier; Bill Clinton, whom Trump has spent years attacking, was judged “average.”
Academic surveys of presidential historians have produced markedly different rankings. The most recent Presidential Greatness Project poll, which asked 154 academics to rate each of the 45 presidents from 0 (“failure”) to 100 (“great”), placed Trump last. His average score was 10.92. Lincoln, the top finisher, scored 93.87. Trump landed beneath James Buchanan, whom historians have long faulted for failing to avert the Civil War.
Trump performed slightly better, though still poorly, in a 2022 Siena University survey of 141 presidential scholars. In that study he ranked third-to-last, ahead only of Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, the president who succeeded Lincoln and opposed federal protections that would guarantee citizenship for formerly enslaved people. Siena also asked academics to rate presidents across categories including “background,” “executive ability” and “leadership ability.” Trump placed 45th of 45 in both “integrity” and “intelligence.”
The scholarly consensus appears to cut across partisan lines. “We break down our results between self-identified Democrats or self-identified conservatives or Republicans,” said Justin Vaughn, a political science professor at Coastal Carolina University and co-creator of the Presidential Greatness Project. “When you look at the statistics of the Republican respondents versus the Democratic respondents, the Republicans also view Trump very poorly.”
Vaughn’s assessment is echoed by other presidential scholars. Barbara Perry, a professor in presidential studies at the University of Virginia, said: “In no universe of scholars, I believe, would Donald Trump be in the ‘great’ category, the ‘greatest’ category, ‘near great’ category.”
Perry, a constitutional historian, went further, saying that Trump’s “promotion of the insurrection of January 6, and his continuation of perpetuating this view that Joe Biden stole the election: that is undermining the American constitutional system, the rule of law.”
She added: “Not to mention the racism and the bias against anybody who’s not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. So all those things will work against him, I believe, throughout history.”
The White House pushed back against the scholarly assessments. “President Trump is solely focused on fighting every day to deliver the strong, safe, and prosperous country that we all deserve,” spokesperson Davis Ingle said. “The only legacy President Trump is concerned with is making America greater than ever before.”
Ingle continued: “But when all is said and done, this President will undoubtedly go down as the most successful and consequential president in modern American history.”
Perry cautioned that the verdict is not yet final. Americans “have a kind of a golden glow about most ex-presidents,” she said, noting that presidential rankings have shifted over the decades as tenures are reassessed. The trajectory of Trump’s historical standing, she suggested, remains open to revision.