Why the worst president ever will be even worse in a second term

As Donald Trump’s presidency began its second year, the American Political Science Association’s Presidents and Executive Politics section ranked each of the nation’s chief executives from best to worst. The scholars agreed at the time that the then-Republican incumbent was on track to be the worst of all time.

They were onto something.

As Trump prepared to exit the White House in January 2021, NYU historian Tim Naftali explained in a piece for The Atlantic that Trump was unique in his horribleness: “[A]s a result of his subversion of national security, his reckless endangerment of every American in the pandemic, and his failed insurrection on January 6, one thing seems abundantly clear: Trump is the worst president in the 232-year history of the United States.”

As we discussed soon after, the assessment seemed rather obvious. What made Trump such an extraordinary failure was the scope and scale of his ignominy. He was corrupt. And ignorant. And overly eager to abuse his powers. And mendacious. And indifferent in the face of crises. And overtly hostile toward the rule of law. And eager to pit Americans against each other. And a genuine threat to the integrity of the republic.

Americans have had presidents who checked some of these boxes, but only Trump checked all of them. As Rachel noted on the show on the last day of the Republican’s first term, our “worst presidents in history” lists “need to be recalibrated to account for the new undisputed king of that category.”

Earlier this year, scholars participating in the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey agreed: Trump wasn’t just bad, he was quite literally the worst.

I’m often reminded of the Time magazine cover that was published the week of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. It helped capture the chaos and shambolic destruction that Trump left for his successor to clean up.

Biden did exactly that. And as Biden prepared to exit the White House, tens of millions of Americans thought it’d be sensible to give his predecessor a second bite at the apple, returning power to the failed president who’d created the messes in the first place.

Time will tell whether the GOP president-elect fares any better in a second term, but it’s easy to predict that the worst president in American history will be even worse going forward.

Part of this assumption is rooted in the Republican Party’s success in politicizing the federal courts, coupled with GOP lawmakers’ eagerness to serve as pitiful rubber stamps for whatever the Trump White House wants.

There’s also the fact that the president-elect and members of his inner circle learned valuable tactical lessons from their first go-around, and they're prepared to apply those lessons going forward.

But I’m also stuck on something John Mitnick, who was general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump, wrote over the weekend. The conservative Republican and Heritage Foundation veteran, who pleaded with voters not to return his former boss to power, explained that the United States did not go “completely off the rails” during Trump’s first term because “there were just enough senior officials who served as ‘guardrails.’”

If Trump is re-elected, Mitnick added, “senior administration positions will be filled entirely by blindly ambitious or unqualified radicals and grifters who pass a test of personal loyalty to Trump. There will be no ‘adults in the room’ who stand up for the Constitution and our cherished American democratic institutions.”

Periodically in recent years, people close to Trump shed light on important behind-the-scenes details. In mid-April 2017, for example, Politico had a report on the internal turmoil in the White House. It was the responsibility of Trump’s advisers, one said, “to talk him out of doing crazy things.”

Four months later, Axios had a related piece, citing a half-dozen “dismayed” senior administration officials, exasperated by the then-president’s dangerous instincts. “You have no idea how much crazy stuff we kill,” one said.

In 2018, outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan talked about his private efforts to prevent Trump from making enormous mistakes. “I can look myself in the mirror at the end of the day and say I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy,” the Wisconsin Republican said on his way out the door.

It’s not just that sensible voices will be absent in the second Trump White House, it’s that those who might have something of merit to say will be identified, hunted, silenced and removed to protect the monolith of MAGA groupthink.

I suppose some observers might think Trump’s first term represented rock bottom. My advice for those thinking along those lines: Just wait.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

Steve Benen

Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."