Illustration: Elena Scotti (Photos: Getty Images, AP)
President-elect Ulysses S. Grant refused to ride to his inauguration in the same carriage as his predecessor Andrew Johnson. Widely regarded as the most divisively racist president in U.S. history, Johnson, who took office following Lincoln’s assassination, was the first president to be impeached after pardoning hundreds of Confederate enslavers, blocking Congress’s attempts to grant civil rights to Freedmen, and violating the Tenure of Office Act, coming one Senate vote shy of being removed from office. During Grant’s inauguration, Johnson pouted in the White House rather than attend the ceremony. It’s a scenario that may well repeat itself come January: disgraced racist throwing a tantrum while a large faction of the country celebrates finally being rid of him.
“You’re the worst president in American history,” Joe Biden mumbled as an aside during his first debate against President Donald Trump. And while political debates are usually a time for hyperbole, historians and political scientists generally agree that Donald Trump combines the individual worst qualities of America’s most terrible presidents—the racism of Johnson mixed with the disastrous crisis mismanagement of Hoover and the highly publicized scandal of Nixon—to create a perfect shitstorm of abysmal leadership that has left over 200,000 Americans dead of covid-19 and unemployment higher than the Great Recession and Great Depression combined, with no plans for relief in sight.
There really is not much of a bright side to the deadly disaster that has been the Trump presidency; even if Biden wins the election come Tuesday, he’ll inherit a mess of historic proportions. But one possible glimmer of hope lies in the fact that the story of American progress is at least partially the story of times the country has forged ahead following shitty leadership. Advancement often follows bad presidents: Lincoln after Buchanan, Reconstruction after Johnson, Roosevelt after Hoover, Obama after Bush, and the Watergate Babies, an influx of newly-elected Democrats, following Nixon’s public disgrace. The nation has pulled off the cleanup before—but there’s a window, and we’ll have to act fast.
Dr. Denver Brunsman, associate professor of history at George Washington University, explained that bad presidents are typically bad in specific ways. “The pantheon of bad presidents would include Andrew Johnson who was impeached and incredibly racist and attempted to sabotage Reconstruction after the Civil War, to Richard Nixon who had all his troubles with corruption,” Brunsman told Jezebel. “The unique thing about Trump is that if you look at the list of problems presidents have had in the past, they fall into a few different categories. One big one is mismanaging crises—Buchanan, Hoover, and Bush—then presidents like Johnson who sowed racial division in the country, and Nixon who had his own special problems with corruption. But Trump combines all three of these categories.”
Presidential history is one long chain of new presidents stepping in to try and repair the damage caused by the unqualified person who last held the job. Perhaps most memorable in that regard is the presidency of Andrew Johnson, the enslaver and Democrat who ran as Lincoln’s vice-president. Just six weeks into his vice-presidency, Lincoln was assassinated, and Johnson began to systematically dismantle any planned progress for newly emancipated Black Americans following the war. Instead, he mass-pardoned Confederate leaders and allowed them to slip back into positions of power, despite the protestations of Congress, which resulted in the mass murders of Black people, who still weren’t fully American citizens, across the South and the foundation of groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
“Congress tried to grant the Freedman civil rights, and tried to grant the right to vote,” says Dr. Tyler Anbinder, who specializes in nineteenth-century American politics at George Washington University. “But then Johnson helped create the political conditions that made resisting those things seem reputable, rather than dishonorable treason.”
Impeached by Congress and just one vote shy of being removed from office, Johnson wasn’t nominated by either party for re-election and Ulysses S. Grant was elected president. Anger at Johnson’s determination to welcome Confederate defectors back into the union sparked a sense of unity in legislative branches of the government that paved the way for the 14th and 15th Amendments, which granted citizenship to emancipated people and ensured their right to vote, despite the best efforts of Johnson. It’s possible that had Congress not been united in its opposition to Johnson, these amendments wouldn’t have received the support they got, according to Dr. Jefferson Cowie, James G. Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University: “Johnson was a horrible president, and a horrible human being,” Cowie told Jezebel. “But his horribleness united the radical Republicans to advance Reconstruction amendments, largely because Johnson played a galvanizing role in people thinking he’s a clear example of what we don’t want. So he brought people together inadvertently.”
But Reconstruction was ultimately a project left half-completed, and largely abandoned in the following decade. Government failures to fully protect the rights of Black Americans are directly responsible for Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, along with a horrific legacy of police-sanctioned, deadly racism. These failures have been highlighted by a summer of protests following the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, President Donald Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacists, and his administration placing the blame on Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer for domestic terrorists’ plot to kidnap her.
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