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May 8, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
21:51
U.S. Presidents RANKED! Who Was The Most Legendary?

Who are the best, worst, and most mediocre presidents in American history? Here’s my complete tier ranking of half of the U.S. presidents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hey everybody, Michael here.
A lot of times people will ask a very basic question about American history.
They'll say, who was the best president?
Who was the worst president?
How would you rank the presidents?
I have done it.
I have given you the definitive list of the most legendary presidents.
Without further ado, check it out.
With a foggy-headed marionette in the Oval Office, I figured now would be a better time than just about ever to give out a definitive ranking of the presidents.
You know, other people, they'll say this is S-tier and this is F-tier.
We have different categories.
For the top tier, the S-tier, we have King Arthur, the ideal leader.
At the next level, right below that, where you can really show, you know, you got some bullions.
Oh, the language on you.
You know, you're really tough.
Maybe you're not quite the top, but you're pretty good.
King Leonidas.
In the third tier, kind of middle of the road, some good stuff, but a little bit weak, you've got King Mufasa.
The level below that, now things are getting pretty bad, you have King Lear.
And then at the lowest tier, we of course have the Burger King level of Commander-in-Chief.
Those are the five categories.
Arthur, Leonidas, Mufasa, Lear, and Burger.
Now, let's get started.
I'm going to try to get through at least half of the presidents and give them the definitive ranking.
Let's begin with...
Numero uno, George Washington.
George Washington, first president of the United States, no question whatsoever, he is King Arthur.
He may actually be the reincarnation of King Arthur.
The indispensable man, loved lots of the founding fathers, he was the best among them.
Without George Washington, there would not be a United States of America, I'm pretty confident to say.
So he's the one, he gets the top spot, no surprise there.
Next up, John Adams, the second president of the United States.
He was less commanding, perhaps, than George Washington, but he was still really, really great.
I'm going to give him Leonidas.
Leonidas.
Okay, he's right below that top tier.
Like Leonidas, he lost, right?
So he won one term, but then he lost to Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800.
The other thing I really like about John Adams, other than he was a conservative and a real conservative, you know, he defended the British...
Soldiers in the Boston Massacre because he felt that they were in the right and that the way the press had been covering this was not fair.
But then, of course, he was one of the great patriots in the revolution.
So really fair-minded, very conservative.
He had an acid tongue.
He once said of Alexander Hamilton, who was a member of Adams' own party, that he was the brastered bat of a scotch peddler and there were not enough whores in Philadelphia to contain his superabundance of secretions.
That's a pretty terrific diction.
He'll get that Leonidas level.
Next up, Thomas Jefferson.
The man who beat John Adams.
I'm going to give Jefferson...
He gets Leonidas too.
He's not quite King Arthur because some of his ideas were a little kooky.
But this is also the reason why Jefferson gets such a high ranking.
He talks like a big lib.
If you read a lot of what Jefferson wrote, he really sounded kind of like a lib.
However, he behaved in many ways like a conservative.
He expanded the United States.
He was a great defender of liberal education.
Liberal in the good sense of that word.
Even though he did, he kind of weakened it a little bit.
Founded the University of Virginia.
All around really, really impressive guy.
So, okay, he's up there with Leonidas.
Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States.
Everyone wants me to say...
Burger King level.
Or at the very best, he's a Mufasa type.
Or a King Lear.
No.
Andrew Jackson also gets Leonidas level.
I know.
They're going to call me a racist or a sexist or a thisist or a thatist.
Oh, Andrew Jackson, he was mean to the Indians or something, which frankly, he was actually his successor who was far meaner to the Indians.
But let's not forget, Andrew Jackson fought wars.
He was a war hero, not just against the Indians, but against the British.
He was the hero of New Orleans.
When it comes to the Indian wars, by the way, for the people who want to say that he was a big racist or something like that, he actually adopted an Indian child who had been orphaned.
So I don't think he harbored any kind of personal bigotry.
He was a man of and for the people, demonstrated great courage.
He was also against the kind of bureaucratized government, the professional administrative class.
He was really against that.
Had a little bit of populism.
I think this is why Trump liked Jackson so much.
So I don't care.
He founded the Democrat Party.
Okay, whatever.
That's fine.
He still gets Leonidas tier for me.
He pursued necessary national policies and had the courage to do it.
Next up, William Henry Harrison.
Most people don't think about that name.
Harrison was the shortest presidency that we've ever had.
Harrison was president for exactly one month.
So he can't be King Arthur.
He didn't make it that long.
He can't be Leonidas, really.
But I'll give him...
Gosh, should I give him Leonidas too?
No, that's a little too much.
I'll give him Mufasa.
He's that kind of Mufasa tier.
The reason I really like him, though, is, first of all, he's the hero of Tip Canoe.
He was a good, strong American military leader.
And he didn't like that he was being insulted on the campaign trail.
He didn't like that people were saying he'd lost a step or two.
So for his inauguration...
He went out, and it was a rainy, cold day, and he gave a two-hour-long speech.
And they had already trimmed it down.
He gave a two-hour-long speech in the cold and in the rain.
He then attended multiple inauguration parties, and he just went out.
He really did it up, and then he took sick and he died shortly thereafter.
But you've got to give him credit for the gumption.
A lot of courage, so good on him.
Next up, Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States.
He is the only president, I think, who could vie with Washington for that King Arthur level because his mind was so capacious.
He was such a symbol of the American dream, the American idea.
A guy rose up from nothing, very serious, had studied Shakespeare and the King James Bible.
That was what made up the bulk of his education.
He did try toward nobility throughout his entire life, and where he fell short, he at least was always trying.
He was really striving for self-improvement, held the country together, and in that sense, refounded the nation after the Civil War.
So he gets up there with King Arthur.
Next up, James Garfield, 20th President of the United States.
Everybody forgets James Garfield.
He also died shortly after he was brought into office.
He died, I think he was assassinated.
Could be wrong about that.
He might have just taken sick and died.
But anyway, that's not why I'm interested in Garfield.
Garfield, I guess, would get a Mufasa level.
He wasn't super-duper impressive, except that he published the first blank book in American history.
This was called The Political Achievements and Statesmanship of General Hancock, regular Democratic nominee for president.
It was five blank pages.
The first blank book in American history was Republicans trolling Democrats in the 1880 presidential election.
For that alone, he has to at least rank in that middle tier, if not a little bit higher.
Next up, the vice president to James Garfield, who became president upon his death, who published the second blank book in American history in the next presidential election.
That would be Chester A. Arthur, a highly, highly underrated president.
Chester Arthur had a very strong record.
He was good on matters of civil rights.
He was a relatively modest president.
He was relatively humble.
Republicans right now, by the way, can learn something from Chester Arthur in the way that he handled the immigration question You know, Republicans have this thing where we want to have national borders.
We want to control who gets to come into the country.
We want there to be national unity.
Of course, every country wants to do that.
But in the United States, if you say that you want to enforce very basic laws of immigration, you're called a racist.
That's racist!
And Chester Arthur, there was a big immigration law that came up during his presidency in 1882, and he vetoed the first version of the bill because he felt that it would have been punitive and violated some treaties.
And so he sent it back, and then there was another bill that came to his desk, which was, you know, a little bit...
More moderate in its immigration policies, and he signed that one into law.
So you can be tough on it without, you know, falling into bigotry or racism or something like that.
It was moderate.
Moderation is a virtue.
But it was strong in the sense that it did enforce national borders and, you know, assimilate immigrants who would come in and maintain that national unity.
Great stuff, Chester Arthur.
He does not get enough credit.
People forget about him, but he really did a good job.
Took over after Garfield.
So I guess I'll put him at Mufasa level too.
Some interesting reforms under him.
Next up, Grover Cleveland.
I'm not saying I love Grover Cleveland.
He was a big dem.
But he has the distinction of being the 22nd and the 24th president.
He's the only president who won non-consecutive terms.
So good on him for that.
You've got to give him some credit.
He's at least a Mufasa.
I think he...
No, we'll give him a Mufasa.
You want to give him that Leonidas because he was just so tough that he went and got that second term, but I'll give him the Mufasa level.
And then we get to very possibly the worst president in the history of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, 28th president.
Woodrow Wilson only became president, by the way, because Teddy Roosevelt wanted to come back into power.
So he split the conservatives who would have been voting for his successor, Taft, and that by splitting the right, gave Woodrow Wilson a way to enter the White House and destroy our country.
Wilson is the most consciously progressive president in American history.
He said that the old constitutional government is outdated.
It's based on the laws of Isaac Newton and a fixed universe and permanent human nature.
So you got to ditch all that.
We're living in the age of Darwin, baby.
Everything's evolving.
We're using the power of rock and roll to change the world.
We need to let government bureaucrats just run the whole country absent any accountability to the people.
He just ruined everything, just about.
Everyone always goes after Wilson for being a racist.
Like, sure, that's bad.
But when you consider the list of the horrible things this guy did, I don't even know if it's on the first three pages.
That's how bad his presidency was.
He's going to be King Lear.
The reason he's not all the way down at Burger King is because he really did die kind of mad and furious and ripping his hair out.
Because finally, after he had almost thoroughly destroyed the country, the Senate refused to go along with his stupid United, or at that time, the League of Nations plan.
So they wouldn't sign on to it.
And he was really upset by that.
And he died from the stress.
So, you know, kind of like Lear, he's just screaming and yelling, blow wind, crack your cheeks.
Next up.
Warren Harding.
Oh, Warren Harding, you know, that guy's at least a Mufasa.
He is.
Everyone thinks he's a Burger King.
Everyone says, oh, Harding, he's one of the worst presidents in American history.
Very, very underrated president.
When he died in office, he was one of the most popular presidents in the history of the country.
He was really strong on various matters, you know.
He, like, how do I put this?
I sound like I'm Donald Trump.
He was really strong on the thing.
You know the thing.
They always try to hit him on teapot dome.
This was this scandal for Harding that, you know, there was some moderate sort of corruption.
That was just a way to distract from him.
He had a very good record.
He was very popular.
He was serving the interests of the people.
He was a modest reformer.
I give him Mufasa.
Next up, Calvin Coolidge, Silent Cal.
Last of his breed.
Gotta love Silent Cal.
I would put him at...
I put him at a Leonidas level.
The reason I put him at a Leonidas level is he was so deferential to the American tradition.
He was so reverent toward George Washington.
He was so modest in his own personal comportment.
He really stood firm with this changing tide where you were going to get more and more of a sort of aggressive celebrity presidency.
He stood firm against that.
Silent Cal.
He was good.
Only president to ever shrink the government.
Next up, Franklin Roosevelt.
32nd president of the United States.
This one...
Kills me.
Because on the one hand, he's the most effective president we've ever had.
He was a king.
He made himself a king.
Whereas someone like Calvin Coolidge would rather leave office than stay in office longer than George Washington.
Roosevelt, he wanted to stay there four terms.
He would have stayed there longer had he not died.
Roosevelt just utterly upending the country, implementing the sort of government that Woodrow Wilson had designed.
So he was ruthlessly effective, but it was all bad.
So should he rank really high up on the list or really low?
I'm going to put him really low.
He is the Burger King.
Not because he was a joke, not because he was incompetent.
Burger King is a very successful company.
But because he was no King Arthur.
Let's put it that way.
Next up, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
He was a Republican.
He was a war hero, but he was kind of a lib.
Let's get busy!
This is the problem.
This is really tough.
So I guess I'd give him Mufasa level.
Maybe his heart was in the right place.
Maybe he was trying to do good stuff.
But he ultimately was not particularly successful.
He, in many ways, accelerated the liberalization of America.
This is why William F. Buckley Jr., when he founded the post-war conservative movement, he was pretty cool to Ike.
They wanted a more conservative candidate.
Eisenhower much more from the liberal wing of the party.
On the flip side of that, you have John F. Kennedy.
John F. Kennedy was from the more conservative wing, anti-communist wing of the Democratic Party.
Now, I'm not one of these people that idolizes Kennedy.
You know, he's fine.
He wasn't president for very long.
I like your funny words, magic man.
I would probably rank him, though, at a Leonidas level.
The reason I would put him at Leonidas is, you know, he was a lib and in his personal life he was a bit of a degenerate.
But he was a staunch Anti-communist.
He loved Joseph McCarthy.
Actually, John F. Kennedy's brother, Robert Kennedy, went to Joe McCarthy's funeral.
That's how much the Kennedys loved McCarthy.
He was the most toughest anti-communist crusader we had.
So I'd give him Leonidas for that.
And then, unfortunately, the communists took him out.
Next up is LBJ. LBJ... Also, he's another one like FDR, LBJ, 36th president, pushed through the great society, radically upended our culture and our political system, and really, in a way, sort of refounded the country in terms of the legal and political upheavals during his reign.
So very, very effective, great at amassing power.
If you read the biography of LBJ by Robert Caro, you see that this guy is as dishonest as they come.
This guy was stealing elections back in college.
He stole an election for his little staff club when he was working on the Hill.
He certainly stole that 1948 Senate election in Texas, which is how he then became senator, vice president, and then president after Kennedy died.
So the effect of LBJ Pretty weak stuff.
I would put him at the Lear level because also by the time he ran for re-election or wanted to run for re-election, he couldn't.
The popularity was not there.
Next up, Richard Nixon.
Richard Nixon is a tragic case because in many ways he was a terrific president.
He was one of the great political figures of his age.
Nixon always wins!
He was basically the only person who believed Whitaker Chambers when Whitaker Chambers said that there are commies in the government, up to and including Alger Hiss, who helped found the UN at the State Department.
Guys like Harry Dexter White at Treasury.
Everyone said, oh, you're crazy.
This is conspiratorial.
No way.
All the libs tried to downplay it.
But no, there were commies throughout the U.S. government who were taking direct orders from Moscow and who were serving as Soviet spies.
So Nixon knew it.
He caught it.
They never forgave him for it.
They never forgave him for taking down Alger Hiss.
That's why there were so many shenanigans in 1960, and that's why the deep state stole the election from him, or rather stole the presidency from him after he won re-election later on.
However...
Nixon let his paranoia run away with him.
He made some crucial political mistakes, and he went down because of it.
I'm not saying it was fair, but he probably went down a little bit like King Lear.
Too bad, because if not for that, he's either a King Lear or a Leonidas.
He's one of the two.
It just depends on kind of what part of his career you're going to focus on.
So you know what?
Because I want to take a more positive view of Nixon, I'll give him the Leonidas thing.
But he did go down, so in some ways he's kind of like King Lear.
Make of that what you will.
Jimmy Carter.
Burger King.
Done.
That's it.
It's easy.
Ronald Reagan.
Reagan, 40th President of the United States.
Really terrific.
He's a Leonidas.
He's not quite a King Arthur.
I love Reagan, but he's not quite a King Arthur.
But he was great.
He understood what was going on.
He stood firm.
He won the Cold War.
He had a clear view of the world.
His legacy has been tarnished by a bunch of squishes who pretend to speak for him, and they call themselves Reaganites, but they're not really.
Reagan was a lot tougher than people give him credit for.
Next up, George H.W. Bush.
He's...
Mufasa, I guess.
I'm being generous, I think, to George H.W. Bush.
You know, he was an admirable guy.
He lived an admirable life.
He was from the liberal wing of the Republican Party, but upright guy who just, at the end of the Cold War, when he could have gone really...
been really tough, when he could have really focused on the challenges that we had, he basically embraced a kind of liberal internationalism.
So the Cold War...
It had roiled the United States for the latter part of the 20th century.
We win it.
Reagan wins it.
The Berlin Wall comes down.
And George H.W. Bush, instead of focusing on the cultural new Cold War that was going on in the United States, he decided to look abroad.
And famously, you saw this one in the 1992 Republican nominating convention.
There were two candidates, Pat Buchanan, who was the social conservative, and George H.W. Bush, who was the liberal Republican.
And in the speeches, Buchanan gave the famous culture war speech, which I talk about in my book, Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
And George H.W. Bush talked about how the real fight now is to just make a lot of money.
And we need to control the markets around the world.
So we made some more money and we lost the whole culture.
It's too bad.
Bill Clinton was basically just a continuation of George H.W. Bush.
They were both liberal, centrist internationalists.
There's not much...
Not much of a difference between them.
I guess Clinton was more of a degenerate in his personal life and had creative uses for cigars and things like that.
I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
But, you know, I put him, I don't know, let's see.
I guess he's sort of like a Mufasa.
I mean, no, he's a Burger King.
He's a clown, right?
Bill Clinton's just a clown and won't really be remembered for much of anything.
Because he didn't even ask, what did he stand for?
He stood for his own pleasure, basically.
George W. Bush.
Poor guy.
He actually, I do think, had some beliefs, but he just was not very effective.
And he kind of got rolled by a lot of people.
And so he was upright in his personal comportment.
But in terms of the efficacy of his presidency, it was pretty weak stuff.
He's a Mufasa.
Barack Obama.
Obama was effective.
He really was effective.
And so in that sense, you know, in a way you want to give him credit for being a big tough guy, but because of how bad the effect of his policies were on the country, you got to make him Burger King.
Then we get to Donald Trump, the best president of my lifetime.
I haven't been around very long, but I'd call him a Leonidas.
He's not a King Arthur.
He's got some personal issues.
He would be the first one to tell you that.
But he did fight really hard.
He fought for a good cause.
And he lost, like Leonidas.
He was ultimately unsuccessful, but he put up a good fight.
I think he inspired a lot of people.
I hope that, you know, like Leonidas loses at the Battle of Thermopylae, but the Greeks win the war about a year later.
Hopefully, you know, Trump, they went after him, they went after him.
He fended them off, you know, repeatedly.
But then, You know, in the end, ultimately, they finally got him.
But hopefully, he can inspire the rest of us conservatives to win the longer war.
And finally, Joe Biden.
Joe Biden, is there another tier?
I don't even want to give him credit for being Burger King.
I think that the Burger King stands for much more than Joe Biden does.
And I think the Burger King is in much greater control of his corporation than Joe Biden is in control of the country.
Come on, man!
So he's some lower tier.
He's some lesser fast food restaurant.
So what could be below Burger King?
I guess Joe Biden, he's more of a jack-in-the-box.
He is.
I don't want to offend jack-in-the-box fans out there.
I think their burgers actually taste better than Burger King.
But he's not a full king, Joe Biden.
He is a marionette.
He is just a sort of cloudy-minded marionette.
The strings are being pulled broadly by the liberal establishment.
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