Joe Biden is on track to become the worst president in U.S. history, Craig Shirley, a presidential historian, said on Monday during an appearance on Just the News, No Noise on Monday.
“I ranked him among our five worst presidents in American history,” he said of a previous assessment a year into the Biden presidency. “He’s actually going to become the worst president in American history.”
“People are really beginning to absorb the Biden presidency,” observed host John Solomon. “The last couple of weeks — I think with the China balloon particularly — there are all these questions about ‘what is this president about?’ ‘What is he doing?’ ‘I can’t understand the darn thing!’ How do you view it? We are two years in now — we got a good view of what the Biden presidency is about — where does he rank among the presidents?”
Shirley responded by citing a past piece he wrote assessing the Biden presidency after one year, in which he ranked him amongst the five worst presidents, among the likes of Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Herbert Hoover.
“I’m going to update that [ranking] now,” he said, “He’s actually going to become the worst president in American history.
“Everything he does seems to be about destroying American exceptionalism and the American experiment and Americanism… what we used to call the American creed and American race. And I’m past now scratching my head, and [I’ve] come to the conclusion he’s doing it on purpose. He is a committed collectivist. And like so many other committed collectivists, the woke population of America now, they are bent on destroying America.”
Now, this is an issue you can imagine I have some opinion on, as I wrote a book a few years ago titled The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. As you can expect, I’ve been told a few times now that I need to update the book, do a sequel, etc., etc., because, in light of Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency, it certainly feels like Joe Biden has taken the trophy away from Barack Obama.
From where I sit, that’s actually a more complicated issue. Joe Biden, in every sense of the word, is awful. He inherited a secure southern border and created an unprecedented border crisis. He inherited low inflation and delivered historically high inflation. Obama, in contrast, inherited a recession due to the global financial crisis of 2008. His policies exacerbated what became known as the Great Recession, resulting in the most prolonged recovery since the Great Depression. In fact, it wasn’t until well into his second term that the United States recovered all the jobs lost during the global financial crisis.
But Obama’s social agenda is what had a lasting impact. During his presidency, we got Obamacare, DACA, and the mainstreaming of the transgender ideology — three things that Joe Biden has expanded upon since taking office. I would argue that most of Biden’s agenda is a rehash of the Obama-era status quo. Has he made things worse? For sure, but it took Obama doing it first. Biden couldn’t expand Obamacare or double down on DACA had Obama not made them happen in the first place. It was Obama who unilaterally reinterpreted Title IX to include “gender identity” and thus compel schools to allow boys to compete on girls’ terms and use their bathrooms and locker rooms.
So to me, there’s no doubt that Obama and Biden are the top two worst presidents, but which one is truly worse — well… that may take more time to figure out.
