I’ve written several times (here, here, here, here, here, and here) about Trump’s economic illiteracy.

Five of those columns were about Trump’s blind spot on trade and one dealt with his affinity for price controls.

Today, we’re going to explain that he’s also illiterate about history. At least with regards to ranking presidents.

He recently shared his ranking of presidents, predictably listing himself as “the greatest.” What surprised me, however, were the grades he assigned to some other residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This column will explain why some of his rankings are wildly wrong.

I’ll start with an observation about “recency bias,” which is assigning excessive importance to things that just happened compared to things that happened a long time ago.

For instance, Trump lists Biden, Obama, and G.W. Bush as failures.

I’ve graded all three negatively, but I hardly think they rank among the worst presidents of all time.

But those are modest mistakes. Let’s look at the presidents that are way under-rated and the ones that are way over-rated.

Under-Rated Presidents.

• Ronald Reagan – The good news is that Trump didn’t drop Reagan too far, but the bad news is that Reagan’s record merits a very high ranking. I’m guessing that Trump is instinctively jealous and insecure because he realizes the Gipper was a far superior president.
• Calvin Coolidge – Rating Coolidge as “below average” is preposterous. Like Reagan, he deserves to be near the top.
• Warren Harding – Harding lowered taxes and cut spending (genuine spending cuts, not make-believe DC cuts). He may not deserve to be as high as Reagan and Coolidge, but it is absurd to label him a “failure.”

Over-Rated Presidents.

• Franklin Roosevelt – Modern scholarship has shown that FDR’s policies lengthened and deepened the Great Depression. Calling him a “great” president is rewarding failure.
• Richard Nixon – Nixon is widely criticized for scandals, but Trump apparently is unaware that Nixon’s economic policy was horrible. He should be in the “failure” group.
• Woodrow Wilson – Like Nixon, Trump also gave Wilson an “average” score. Yet Wilson arguably could be America’s worst president.

Trump also screwed up the rankings for other presidents (LBJ rated too high, for instance), but I focused on instances where Trump was dramatically wrong.

If you want an example of accurate presidential rankings, Prager University did a very good job in rankings released last year.

One final comment is that I’m surprised Trump labelled Hoover as a “failure” considering he’s copied his awful trade policy.

P.S. If you want my rankings of recent presidents (from LBJ to Trump), click here. You won’t be surprised to see that Trump is not “the greatest.”