The Best and Worst American Presidents

by Dan Mitchell | Nov 7, 2025

In 2020, I put together a ranking of recent presidents, mostly because I wanted to make the point that partisan labels don’t necessarily matter. 

Indeed, over the past 60-plus years, Republicans were some of the worst in terms of statist policy (especially on the issue of government spending).

I’ve also shared comprehensive analyses of the economic policy of selected presidents.

But I’ve never ranked all presidents from best to worst. Especially when considering all issues rather than just economic policy.

So I was very interested when Prager University asked me to take part in a survey designed to rank every chief executive from George Washington to Joe Biden (Trump was not included since we obviously don’t know what his final record will be).

According to me (and 154 other people), George Washington deserves first place. Here are the top-6 presidents of all time.

Now for my two cents. I definitely think Thomas Jefferson is ranked too high.

I’m also not sure why Eisenhower gets a very high score. Yes, he led the allied forces in WWII, but that presumably means he was a good general. In his role as president, he mostly was a placeholder. Nothing really good happened and nothing really bad happened.

Having said that, I confess that I don’t know enough about some past presidents to know which ones should rank above them (and, of course, I didn’t save the rankings I sent to Prager, so I can’t even share that info).

Now let’s look at the six-worst presidents of all time.

Once again, I’ll add my two cents.

Woodrow Wilson would be my choice for last place. He had terrible policy (income tax, Federal Reserve, etc) and also was a terrible person.

I also think FDR deserves to be very low on the list, perhaps second to last. When discussing Roosevelt, some people tell me, “but he was president when we won WWII.” My response is “so what?” since presumably anyone who was in the White House would have responded in the same way.

And Lyndon Johnson definitely belongs in the bottom group. As does Nixon. And Hoover as well.

The rankings also have what is sometimes called “recency bias.” More specifically, Biden and Obama get very low rankings because they are fresh in our memories. From a big-picture perspective, however, I think both of them were bad, but largely irrelevant (see here and here).

For those interested, here are the rankings for all the other presidents.

I’ll add a few closing comments on these middle-tier presidents. I think Harding and Clinton are under-ranked.

And I think Truman and Jackson are over-ranked (as mentioned above, FDR is ranked way higher than he deserves).

Last but not least, Donald Trump would belong in the middle of the pack if he was included. Maybe in the bottom third depending on what happens with the Supreme Court and his awful protectionism.

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Image credit: The U.S. National Archives | Public Domain.