i want to make my viewpoint clear on this.

how bad is trump? or how not so bad is he, really?

these are the presidents over the last fifty years - a list that both jfk and lbj are no longer on.

- nixon
- ford
- carter
- reagan
- bush I
- clinton
- bush II
- obama
- trump

where does trump fall in the list?

well, it's not such an impressive list, is it? you can be a really shitty president, and still end up somewhere in the middle. that's the real problem we're facing in trying to understand trump: his contemporaries were not very impressive.

who were the really, really bad presidents that you put at the very bottom? nixon has a bad reputation, but he had nader on his ass, so you got things like the epa out of him. i would not put nixon at the bottom of this list, or even near it. of the presidents in this pile, bush II is in sole contention for the bottom of the list. so, you take him right out - he was probably the worst the country's seen, and may be the worst the country ever does see. pointless wars, collapsed economy - nobody comes close to this.

are there any near the top? no. i don't think any of these presidents are worth identifying as having done a good job.

are there any that kind of just sat on the throne for a while, keeping it warm? if doing no harm is better than creating harm, you put the caretaker presidents at the top.

so, it follows that the best president of the last fifty years would be gerald ford, because at least he didn't fuck anything up. you'd need to put carter in as a close second, because he didn't accomplish very much, either. the next least memorable president would be obama.

that leaves nixon, reagan, bush, clinton and trump left to place in the middle.

reagan and bush may not have been the disasters that dubya was, but i can't think of a single good policy that they did while in office, and there was certainly a lot of bad, so i'm going to list them together at 7/8. at this stage in history, i can't think of any positive policy that clinton pushed through either, and he really only tweaked the bush-reagan legacy, so he barely comes in at number 6.

trump, on the other hand, may end up with a positive trade legacy - it's hard to say. he has a mixed bag on the military front, but if he ends up being responsible for a serious withdrawal from the middle east, that's more than clinton - who bombed the fuck out of iraq - can claim. if he gets through his term without bombing latin america, he could be the most pro-peace president in the list, with the potential exception of carter.

but, neither clinton nor trump can compete with the positive legacy of nixon, even if he was being pushed by nader, and even if it was on the tail end of the lbj administration. nixon may be responsible for the direction the republicans took in later years, but his legacy in terms of positive policy still stands out in this particular list. if it weren't for all of the terrible things he did, if we were to measure him solely by his positive contributions, he'd clearly be the best in this list.

so, here's your answer. here's a ranking of the presidents of the last fifty years:

1. ford
2. carter
3. obama
4. nixon
5. trump - tentatively
6. clinton
7/8. bush-reagan
9. bush II