Tag: History

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Donald Trump History The Trump Adminstration

Historians Rank Trump Among The 5 Worst Presidents In US History

While he loves to claim that millions of Americans wanted him to win a second term in office, it appears that history will not be kind to failed, one-term former President Donald Trump, who has debuted on C-SPAN’s 2021 Survey of Presidential Leadership in 41st place, which places him among the five worst presidents in U.S. history.

Politico reports that the survey is conducted annually among a collection of historians, and those historians do not think much of Trump:

“This survey marks Trump’s first appearance on the list, on which the one-term president placed higher than only three other presidents: Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson and the perpetually last-ranked James Buchanan.”

The ratings are based on 10 qualities of presidential leadership;

  • Public Persuasion
  • Crisis Leadership
  • Economic Management
  • Moral Authority
  • International Relations
  • Administrative Skill
  • Relations with Congress
  • Vision/Setting an Agenda
  • Pursued Equal Justice for All
  • Performance Within the Context of the Times

When it comes to administrative skills, Trump ranked dead last among his predecessors in American history. He also ranks last when it comes to moral authority.

The reasons for Trump’s low rating are almost too numerous to mention, but presidential historian Douglas Brinkley suggested it had a lot to do with the 2021 impeachment, which made Trump the only president in history to be impeached twice:

“This year, people compared which is worse: Watergate or the Trump impeachment? The word ‘impeachment’ probably cost Nixon a few spots downward this year, and maybe Clinton too.”

In what will no doubt be especially galling to Trump, Barack Obama moved into the top 10.

The top 5 presidents, according to historians, are Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Lincoln has been ranked first since the survey began in 2000.

In time, as it becomes clearer just how incompetent and fundamentally evil Trump was during his term in office, it’s safe to predict he will be seen s the worst president in the long history of the United States. If he’s indicted, that spot is virtually guaranteed.

 

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GOP History Racism

Mitch McConnell Gets Taken To The Woodshed For Trying To Paper Over The GOP’s Racist History

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) thought he’d try and rewrite the history of his party on Tuesday, but he immediately got smacked down by the facts about the GOP which are written in bigotry and hatred.

During a debate on whether or not to eliminate the filibuster in the U.S. Senate, McConnell said the procedure — through which one senator can bring all business in the upper chamber to a screeching halt — had not been used in the past (by Republicans) to delay passage of civil rights legislation in the 1950s:

“It has no racial history at all. None. There’s no dispute among historians about that.”

That’s a lie, and McConnell said it knowing damn well it was a lie.

History shows that the longest filibuster ever held in the Senate was made by the blatantly racist GOP Sen. Strom Thurmond in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, speaking continuously for 24 hours and 15 minutes to prevent black Americans from having the same rights as whites.

Steven S. Smith, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, explained the use of the filibuster by Republicans during the bad old days:

“The histories of the filibuster, civil and voting rights, and race in America are intertwined.”

How racist is the history of the Senate filibuster? It was once used to block anti-lynching bills. That is the shameful past of the procedure McConnell tried to paper over.

Fortunately, however, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance of Alabama was quick to counter McConnell, noting:

When he started getting criticism, McConnell’s office tried to walk back what he’d said:

For those who aren’t familiar with the full history of the Republican Party, it was once the Party of Lincoln. But then Richard Nixon was elected, followed by Ronald Reagan (who railed against “welfare queens” in a blatant attack on African-American women), and later was the party of choice for Donald Trump, who called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and suggested that anyone who dared to protest was a hoodlum or an “animal.” The GOP has become the party of bigotry and racial hatred. And the filibuster is part of that legacy, despite what McConnell or any other revisionist historian tries to assert.

How can you tell when someone is a racist? When they deny their own past, their support of bigots, and their cozy relationship with neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and white separatists.

Nice try, Mitch, but you’re just as full of shit as ever. And you’re also a terrible liar.