Donald Trump is a megalomaniac credibly accused of making unwanted advances toward multiple women. He peddles in racial animus to accrue political capital, values sycophancy over principles or intellect, and spent half of his career screwing people over to make a quick million or two.
He’s also not remotely the worst president we’ve ever had, despite former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid just calling him “without question the worst president we’ve ever had.”
President Trump stands accused of groping and sexually harassing over a dozen women. Former President Bill Clinton stands accused of the same by at least three women and outright rape by one (or perhaps three, if you believe long-reported stories about two alleged rapes at Oxford and Yale Universities). Both former Presidents Grover Cleveland and John F. Kennedy were also credibly accused of rape. On the matter of violence against women, Trump is depressingly far from the worst of the pack.
Trump has repeatedly painted immigrants and foreigners with a broad, racially charged brush. However, he also didn’t forcibly incarcerate American citizens on the sole basis of race, as former President Franklin D. Roosevelt did with Japanese-Americans during World War II. And while Trump’s winks and nods to the Breitbart crowd during his campaign were disturbing and unethical, they don’t hold a candle to the unabashed racism of former President Woodrow Wilson, who actually resegregated the federal government, reversing the immense progress made by predecessors Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Wilson also referred to black people as “an ignorant and inferior race.” You think Steve Bannon was bad enough in the White House? Wilson orchestrated one of the first ever film screenings in the White House for his Cabinet members and their families with D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” a three-hour ode to the Confederacy, white supremacy, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Between his unwise and continuing support for Michael Flynn and his unending need for public praise, Trump’s overemphasis on personal loyalty has certainly harmed his presidency more than helped it. But at least, as his pivots against bad apples Bannon and Omarosa Manigault Newman demonstrate, he has a line. His desire for sycophancy pales in comparison to that of former President Warren G. Harding, who appointed his incompetent friends to the independent Federal Reserve Board and as director of the U.S. Mint. Even more egregious, Harding let one of those friends, Charles Forbes, flee the country after his corruption as director of the Veterans’ Bureau came to light. (Forbes was arrested, found guilty, and imprisoned shortly after his return to the country.)
Critics charge Trump with corruption due to his past business endeavors, such as the scam of Trump University. But again, nothing Trump did as a private citizen and entrepreneur can remotely compare to the immorality of former President Richard Nixon’s crimes during Watergate. The Mueller investigation has thrown criminal charges at five of Trump’s past associates for crimes still not directly linked to Trump. Watergate resulted in the convictions of 48 of Nixon’s officials.
Trump is more open in embracing flagrant dishonesty, but let’s not pretend that this isn’t a tale as old as time. Upending norms and standards of public civility isn’t good for the country, but as far as presidential packages go, Trump is far from the worst.
This shouldn’t be taken as a pass for him, or a call to lower our expectations of the president, but rather a call to higher standards in the hope that we nominate less corrupt candidates in the future.
