Siena College Research Institute Presidential Survey

Presidents Day 2022: New Documentaries On Abraham Lincoln And Lyndon B. Johnson, And New Siena College Research Institute Presidential Survey

Today is Presidents Day 2022, and yesterday and continuing are documentaries on Abraham Lincoln on History Channnel (Sunday to Tuesday); and on Lyndon B. Johnson on CNN (Sunday and Monday).

And Siena College Research Institute, which conducts a Presidential survey among historians, political scientists, and expert journalists, in the second year of each Presidency, just posted a new survey form, as they always do one year into a new Presidency.

So sometime later in the year 2022, the results of the survey will be announced.

And this Presidential scholar, a participant, has just indicated how he ranks the Presidents, including Joe Biden for the first time.

It will be interesting to see what, if any changes, will occur now that Donald Trump is out of the White House, and Joe Biden has served one full year!

Donald Trump Is Both Paranoid And Pronoid At Same Time! He Has Delusions About How Others See Him!

Donald Trump is a paranoid, someone who thinks, without any basis in reality, that everyone is out to “get” him!

But, Donald Trump is also a “pronoid”, someone who thinks, without any basis in reality, that everybody likes him!

For instance, Donald Trump thinks the foreign governments around the world admire him. And he has delusions that the American people really wanted him despite all of the facts that show otherwise. He cannot accept the concept that his reputation is in tatters, and that those who support him in the political world do so more out of fear and concern of crossing him, than true loyalty!

Donald Trump thinks he is a popular person, even though he NEVER hit 50 percent of the population of America voting for him, rather losing both national elections by a total of 10 million votes, but the Electoral College kinks gave him, with Russian collusion, the election in 2016!

Donald Trump is not admirable in any sense, and certainly not a “gentleman” as he perceives, wrongly, that he is!

A “gentleman” is a man who is modest, well mannered, self deprecating, quietly intelligent, considerate of other people’s feelings, and well informed, but Donald Trump does not fit any of these descriptions!

Instead, Donald Trump is vulgar, inflated in his own belief in himself, vain, boastful, noisily ignorant, bullyish, sleazy, mean spirited, and is no model for young people to emulate!

Donald Trump is an obnoxious human being, a womanizer, a person who ridicules disabled people, a white supremacist, a full scale nativist, a promoter of conspiracy theories, a sore loser, and has no capacity for empathy, compassion, and concern about anyone but himself! If he had to abandon his own wife or children, he would do so to save his own skin!

Donald Trump is seriously mentally ill, a danger to America as he has incited domestic terrorism, and even now, six months after the election he clearly lost massively, he refuses to concede, and clearly never will!

Donald Trump insures that he will rank at the bottom of the list of all Presidents for anyone who has any sense of what Presidential leadership and personality means, in analyzing Presidents. Already, in the American Political Science Association Poll in 2018, and the Siena College Research Institute 2018 Presidential Survey, Trump is rated at the bottom of the listings of all Presidents. So much has happened since, including the two impeachment trials of Donald Trump!

Even those Presidents who have major character flaws, including most notably Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon, are elevated by the horrors America has gone through, and the damage done by a man who should never have been allowed in the Oval Office, and has done lasting harm to the institution of the Presidency!

Latest Presidential Ranking Survey For Presidents Day Changes Ratings Of Several Presidents Upward And Downward

The game of Presidential rankings is one always changing, and the newest survey of scholars, including this author as a participant, does not disappoint in that regard.

The Siena College survey, now done six times since 1982, once for each new President being considered in the rankings, has some surprises.

157 experts, questioned by the Siena College Research Institute, raised two of the Founding Father generation to the top ten, with James Madison number 7 and James Monroe, his successor at number 8. In so doing, two modern Presidents were dropped out of the top ten, with Ronald Reagan at number 13 and Lyndon B. Johnson at number 16.

A rare occurrence was that Abraham Lincoln was number 3, when usually he is on top, although in earlier Siena College surveys, Franklin D. Roosevelt had been number one, now number two, with George Washington moving up to number one.

Barack Obama, number 8 in the American Political Science Association survey in 2018, and number 12 in the C Span 2017 survey, ended up number 17 in the Siena College survey, so below such Presidents as Woodrow Wilson, James K. Polk, John Adams, and Bill Clinton.

And Donald Trump, who was dead last in the APSA poll, was number 42, above James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, with Johnson ending up below Buchanan, the opposite of both the C Span and APSA surveys.

Of course, the game of Presidential ranking is a never ending and highly debatable one, and the way that Presidents are ranked is purely in the eyes and expertise of the beholder.

Should a great man, such as Madison or Monroe, but not as accomplished as more modern Presidents, such as Reagan or LBJ, be higher in the ratings?

That is left up to how people perceive Presidents, and whether they include the whole life, or just the actual years of the Presidency, in their judgments.