Is Joe Biden the Worst President in History?

“New odious slime is bubbling up every day.”
— “The Worst President in History,” Matt Margolis & Mark Noonan

Is Joe Biden the worst, the most depraved, blundering, and corrupt president in American history, as many have now come to believe? Victor Davis Hanson refers to the Biden clan as “likely the most corrupt presidential family in American history.” Vito Corleone was a Boy Scout compared to Joe Biden. Indeed, Biden is so unprincipled and degenerate a specimen of humanity as to seem almost fictional, a Manchurian president intent on humiliating, perverting, and ultimately bringing down the country he is sworn to honor and represent. There is considerable consensus on this account.

For The Washington Times, Joe Biden “is the worst American president in decades. He makes his former boss, President Barack Obama, look like a resounding success by comparison (he wasn’t). Not since the Jimmy Carter era have Americans been ‘led’ by such a stunningly incompetent, utterly ineffectual and downright pitiful administration… What we have on our hands now is a national travesty.”

According to The Maui News — and its readers should know — “Anyone who still makes excuses for this inept, corrupt president is as demented as he is… He will go down in history as the absolute worst president ever and will always be a joke.”

For the Anchorage Daily News, there is no debating: “Joe Biden is the worst president in the history of the United States.” The Wisconsin State Journal is equally dispositive: “Joe Biden will go down in history as the worst president ever because of unnecessary spending, the economy, inflation, the border crisis, the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, the war in Ukraine and a potential war with China — not to mention his Justice Department’s decision to indict the former president, which has never happened in America’s history.”

Firstpost makes no bones about Joe Biden’s treachery and unfitness for office: “It is as if an infirm, sleepy octogenarian has surrendered the wheel to shadowy, Deep State hyenas in the backseat. The American wagon is rapidly heading for a place nobody is sure they know. And that makes Joe Biden arguably the worst American President ever.”

The Association of Mature American Citizens (Amac) reports that “54% of voters surveyed by Rasmussen pollsters recently said President Joe Biden is one of the worst, if not the worst, American presidents ever.” Presidential historian and best-selling author Craig Shirley adds his voice to the slumping disaster that is Joe Biden: “Biden is on track to become the nation’s worst president in history.” More recently, Shirley updated the ranking: “He’s actually going to become the worst president in American history.” Forget “on track” He’s already there.

Of course, Biden has a number of serious competitors in the worst president sweepstakes. There is general agreement that James Buchanan is a prime candidate for the award for inflaming racial tensions and losing seven states to the Confederacy. Writing in Public Opinion, Dwight Weidman argues that America’s up-to-now worst president James Buchanan “has some stiff competition at the bottom of the list from our current occupant of the White House. If Biden set out to turn the United States into a marginalized, Venezuela-like socialist country, he is succeeding. If he thinks his anti-fossil fuel, overspending, open-border, soft on crime, woke military and weak foreign policy positions will make America stronger, then he is failing. It seems that the position in last place of America’s 15th president, James Buchanan, is over and has been snatched away by Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.”

Franklin Pierce also scores near the bottom for his pro-slavery policies. Naturally, Donald Trump, venomously hated by the unhinged left, does little better and also figures in the list, usually in 4th place, but the charges against Trump are without exception ludicrously false. Mental Floss, for example, asserts that “Trump appointed a national security advisor [Michael Flynn] who was working as a foreign agent. And that was before he pushed insidious lies about the integrity of the 2020 election, which brought about the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.” Every item mentioned therein is deceitfully counterfactual. The stench of the real lies released from the political latrines of such left-wing sites is almost unbreathable.

None of the modern-era presidents, with the exceptions of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, were particularly distinguished men. Some were superlatively incompetent and others were liars from the egg. One thinks of Jimmy Carter, who gave us the Iranian mullahs; Barack Obama, a Marxist-trained and Alinsky-inspired radical, an Islamic sympathizer, and a contemptible dispenser of apologies for his own country, whom Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan, as of their 2018 book, considered The Worst President in History; and, obviously, the ineffable Joe Biden, of whom Brandon Weichert writes in 19FortyFive, “The smell of death and decay wafts up from Joe Biden’s America in ways that are far more pungent than even when Jimmy Carter ran things.”

Exclusively for our VIPs: Is Joe Biden Really The Democrats’ Best Hope?

Clearly, Biden did not appear out of nowhere. An almost unbroken series of incompetent, amoral, and mendacious presidents, a leftist governing class addicted to evasion, fabrication, and outright deceit, a broken and plundered electoral system, and a dumbed-down electorate have prepared the White House for his occupancy. The situation is so dire that it invites a scriptural interpretation as the only way of making sense of the current abomination, and theologians have not been slow to provide one. Is America being punished for straying from its providential roots? Many religious thinkers are of this mind.

Most notably, Jonathan Cahn has made a career of calling America to repent of its many transgressions in order to avoid the Lord’s judgment. After all, America was founded on principles that formally established it as a second Israel and a nation consecrated to God. One thinks of the words of dedication from George Washington’s first presidential address: “there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that…the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.” Should the nation turn away from its origins and betray its hallowed commitment, it will begin to break apart. “As did ancient Israel,” Cahn writes, “so now America began removing God from its national life, from its culture, its government, and its public squares.” This is the burden of Cahn’s argument. America has sunk into a swamp of corruption and venality and is ripe for chastisement and retribution.

In Desiring God, John Piper, like Cahn, believes that America is being punished for its corruption and perversions. Whether one is a votary or not, the thesis is persuasive. Interestingly, Michael Sherrard contends that America is being judged through its leaders. One thinks in this regard of the perhaps apocryphal story mentioned in John Haldon’s Byzantium: A History about a seventh-century abbot asking God why he sent the wicked tyrant Phocus to rule over the Romans. “Because I could find no worse,” came the reply. One need not be a communicant to conclude that the anecdote amply sums up the current state of affairs. Whether God intended the debacle or not, Phocus now totters in the Oval Office as the nation disintegrates around him.

Lord help us.