Rating America's Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster

by Robert Spencer

Which presidents were the best for America…and which were the worst?

Most historians of the American presidency—walking in lockstep with today’s hard-Left academic establishment—favor presidents who were big-government statists and globalists. They dislike presidents who lowered taxes, protected American workers, and avoided getting the United States entangled in foreign conflicts that had nothing to do with protecting the American people. It is through that prism that they see all of American history.

It’s time for a change. Nowadays, with socialism massively discredited and internationalism facing more opposition than it has since before World War II, it’s time to reevaluate what the Leftist historians have told us. Donald Trump was elected president pledging to put America First, as any nation’s leader should put his or her own people first. There needs to be an America-First reevaluation of him and his predecessors.

This book, therefore, rates the presidents not on the basis of criteria developed by socialist internationalist historians, but on their fidelity to the United States Constitution and to the powers, and limits to those powers, of the president as delineated by the Founding Fathers. America’s presidents are rated on the extent to which they put America First—not in the sense of a narrow isolationism, but whether they really advanced the interests of the American people.

This upends the conventional wisdom about a great deal of American history and present-day reality, and is intended to do so. This book offers what should be the only criteria for rating the occupants of the White were they good for America?

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Presidents

560 pages, Hardcover

Published August 25, 2020

About the author

ROBERT SPENCER is the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of seventeen books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies). Coming in November 2017 is Confessions of an Islamophobe (Bombardier Books).

Spencer has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the FBI, the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Justice Department’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council and the U.S. intelligence community. He has discussed jihad, Islam, and terrorism at a workshop sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the German Foreign Ministry. He is a consultant with the Center for Security Policy.

Spencer is a weekly columnist for PJ Media and FrontPage Magazine, and has written many hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism. His articles on Islam and other topics have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, the New York Post, the Washington Times, the Dallas Morning News, Fox News Opinion, National Review, The Hill, the Detroit News, TownHall.com, Real Clear Religion, the Daily Caller, the New Criterion, the Journal of International Security Affairs, the UK’s Guardian, Canada’s National Post, Middle East Quarterly, WorldNet Daily, First Things, Insight in the News, Aleteia, and many other journals. For nearly ten years Spencer wrote the weekly Jihad Watch column at Human Events. He has also served as a contributing writer to the Investigative Project on Terrorism and as an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.

Spencer has appeared on the BBC, ABC News, CNN, FoxNews’s Tucker Carlson Show, the O’Reilly Factor, Megyn Kelly’s The Kelly File, the Sean Hannity Show, Geraldo Rivera Reports, the Glenn Beck Show, Fox and Friends, America’s News HQ and many other Fox programs, PBS, MSNBC, CNBC, C-Span, CTV News, Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News, France24, Voice of Russia and Croatia National Television (HTV), as well as on numerous radio programs including The Sean Hannity Show, Bill O’Reilly’s Radio Factor, The Mark Levin Show, The Laura Ingraham Show, The Herman Cain Show, The Joe Piscopo Show, The Howie Carr Show, The Curt Schilling Show, Bill Bennett’s Morning in America, Michael Savage’s Savage Nation, The Alan Colmes Show, The G. Gordon Liddy Show, The Neal Boortz Show, The Michael Medved Show, The Michael Reagan Show, The Rusty Humphries Show, The Larry Elder Show, The Peter Boyles Show, Vatican Radio, and many others.

Robert Spencer has been a featured speaker across the country and around the world and authored 17 books. Spencer’s books have been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, Finnish, Korean, Polish and Bahasa Indonesia. His Qur’an commentary at Jihad Watch, Blogging the Qur’an, has been translated into Czech, Danish, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Spencer (MA, Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) has been studying Islamic theology, law, and history in depth since 1980. His work has aroused the ire of the foes of freedom and their dupes: in October 2011, Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups wrote to Homeland Security Advisor (and current CIA director) John Brennan, demanding that Spencer be removed as a trainer for the FBI and military groups, which he taught about the belief system of Islamic jihadists; Brennan immediately complied as counter-terror training materials were scrubbed of all mention of Islam and jihad. Spencer has been banned by the British government from entering the United Kingdom for pointing out accurately that Islam has doctrines of violence against unbelievers. He has been invited by name to convert to Islam by a senior member of al-Qaeda.

Reviews

[Tom Cross · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally a book that rates presidents on accomplishments in serving the American people. It exposes the intelligentsia for ratings based on sounding good rather than solid accomplishments.

[William F]

I graduated in 1981 as a History teacher and this book is a must read for all teachers!!!

[Jonathan Desimone · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the worst book on US presidents I have read and I have read dozens of biographies and related works. The scholarship contained within this book is anecdotal, biased and everything that is wrong with rating Presidents. And if you are a moderate Republican or Democrat, good luck getting through it without tearing your hair out. Where to begin...

I think the author's premise of the constitutional oath and how much they improved the lives of Americans is a totally valid one. It's not the only one to be sure. But it is one reasonable lens through which to evaluate the performance of our chief executive officers. And I agree that the typical ratings system here is totally broken. There is massive recency bias in all the surveys done since the first one over 50 years ago.

Do I agree that several presidents who look mediocre were actually much better? Absolutely. Do I think there are others who are rated far higher than they should be by those same surveys of historians? Absolutely. This corner of American scholarship is middling at best with everyone relying on the qualitative to evaluate presidents.

Let me add that the book is full of factual inaccuracies and half truths that I stopped trying to catalog them as I was listening. A few to illustrate my point. Teddy Roosevelt didnt hatch some plan to build the Panama Canal. Ferdinand DeLessups was working on it for decades before and others had been trying to do something for a long time. Did he take advantage of the political situation to seize control of the company and project? Absolutely. However attributing some huge plan to TR is just not consistent with the historical evidence. The banking crisis in the great depression was happening between the election and FDR's swearing in, a four month gap in those days. Hoover tried to stave it off and FDR wanted to wait until his administration began to take many of the steps that Hoover was arguing for. Where does he come off saying that no one says Reagan ended the cold war? Maybe there are some but the broad school of though would ascribe the credit for the end of the cold war to Reagan over Gorbachev of Pope JPII. But he wants to sound an anti-woke trumpet and this is yet another example.

Overall, his premise that we must evaluate presidents by whether they made life for Americans better is totally colored by the philosophy which attaches to that: small government, low taxes, low debt, less regulation. If a president expands government and solves a problem, I think most would objectively say that was a success. We cannot look through the lens of the founders in a world that is significantly more complicated and connected than it was almost 250 years ago. And I think if we had Madison or Hamilton in the room today, they would agree. While they would likely be surprised with how it has changed, I think they would look approvingly at many of the interpretations made of this relatively short and unamended document (the constitution).

He is also totally schizophrenic in several areas: skewering one side (usually but not always Democratic presidents) and favoring the other. Tariffs and trade is a great example. He mentions early on how presidents did a good job developing positive trade relations with other countries but when we get to trade with Canada and Mexico or China, that is suddenly bad. Sometimes tariffs are good and sometimes they are bad. Actually no dude, read your Adam Smith. Tariffs misallocate resources. Period. Now you can say there are times when tariffs protect a vital industry but we've learned this changes all the time. It's really hard for anyone, let alone governments, to accurately predict which technologies are going to be critical 10-20 years down the road. He speaks approvingly of some wars and territorial acquisitions and negatively of others. Some regulation is good (Pure Food and Drug Act) and some is bad (EPA) but it more depends on his rating of the president vs some objective standard of cost benefit

His use of innuendo and scandal is terribly one sided. Most presidents have one or more scandals. They hire huge teams and people are fallible. Picking on Clinton as much as he did without mentioning Ed Meese and the scandals of the Reagan administration is one obvious place. Character matters to this author but only when he likes the president. Did we hear anything about Donald Trump's infidelities and other legal issues which were already in the press in 2020? Nope. Radio silence. I feel like he uses it to throw shade at whatever president he is discussing and is overly apologetic for any of his more highly rated presidents (like Iran Contra and Reagan) and of course the Trump impeachment.

Time and again he misses correlation vs causation and the natural lag of policy to economic outcomes (let alone totally ignoring the role of the Fed in driving economic policy and growth). And the economic cycle has a natural flow. Did the McKinley tariffs really drive growth? Or more likely after the panic of 1893, did we have a good recession that at some point had to end as economic forces swung the other way? That benefitted McKinley and hurt Cleveland. I'm not saying either might not have had some influence on it and the economy is too big and complex to give presidential policies in the moment that much weight.

And his analysis of the great depression is positively Mellonish--liquidate farmers, liquidate labor, etc... as the treasury secretary is known to have advised. The role of credit in our system, encouraged by Harding, Coolidge and Hoover (even just implicitly) had gotten the point that the normal ebbs and flows of cycles that we saw throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries were just not going to respond in the same way. Had Hoover (who actually did a ton on a relative basis to his predecessors) and FDR (who added a zero or two to that) not acted the way they did, we might have had a communist revolution. The New Deal was flawed (though it certainly helped) and ultimately it was WWII and the war footing for the economy that ended the vicious cycle of price declines.

There is a huge lag between laws and policies and economic outcomes. That is another reason why this book is flawed. If he had stopped with maybe Clinton or GW Bush, that might have been ok. I think we have enough distance from their presidencies to accurate evaluate the true impacts of their decisions. Trying to rate Obama and Trump is crazy in 2020. Literally crazy.

The author seemingly endorses other things like the gold standard (tell me again why the growth of money should depend upon how much of a shiny metal we pull out of ground; or bitcoin by how many computations you make on a computer), climate denial (pulling out of the Paris accord was fine), the ability of the government to regulate sexual relations (in total opposition to his otherwise valuing small less intrusive government) and more.

All of his analysis on the issues we have had with the middle east is just rubbish. He literally blames carter for Iran when anyone knows we put the Shah on the throne with british prodding during the 50s and he ran a repressive state for 2 decades. He wasnt our ally. He was a despot. Ike got sold a bill of goods by his advisors that otherwise might have left a democratically elected government in power in Iran. Funding the Mujahadeen was a good thing and absolutely put pressure on the Soviet Union. Did we underestimate where it could go? Certainly. And have we missed the plot on the whole Shia/Sunni dynamic in the ME? Yup. He goes off on the saudis for 9/11 yet his best president (Trump at a 10/10) made several deals with them and Jared got $2B for his investment fund from them.

His analysis of the Clinton and Obama presidencies is riddled with small negatives vs. the big picture policies he points to (Both good and bad) for many of the earlier presidents. This is another example of the recency bias inherent in this book. He lived through all these and remembers so much more, a lot of it just not relevant to rating the presidency. Another reason why we really cannot rate every President. There has to be a lag.

His calls to undo the civil service reform and go back to spoils system totally ignores how our government has evolved. It would grind to a halt if we were to do away with a professional class of civil servants and let a president sweep thousands or hundreds of thousands away. How could they possibly hire all the people they need? Let alone competent people. This is truly madness. Is there room for the federal bureaucracy to be smaller and more efficient? No doubt and going back to the spoils system is not the answer.

I really wonder if this author would have written the same book after January 6, 2021 though my guess is he would have despite the embarrassment of that day to American Democracy. This book is disappointing to what otherwise could have been a reasonable addition to presidential scholarship. I cant believe I made it through this book but at least wanted to hear a different side to a fascinating question.

[Miles Nilsson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I quit reading this book because I am underwhelmed with the quality of analysis by the author. It is too difficult to do justice to all of the presidents in a book like this. I do not think that the surveys of professional historians and political scientists' rankings of presidents that come out periodically are very good or edifying. This author cannot even compete with the low standard set by those supposed experts.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great overview of every single president of the United States: how they got elected, what they were up against during their presidency, what they accomplished, and a rating on a scale of 0 to 10 which corresponds with the arguments presented. Conventional wisdom holds several of these presidents in esteem or dishonor but the facts, as laid out in this book, go a long way towards changing one's mind in the opposite direction. For myself, I am energized to do a deep dive on each and every president. Not only because I'll learn about their presidencies, but also to learn about the history of the United States in so doing.

[John Thum · Rating 4 out of 5]

I generally agree with his assessment of many of the presidents. I think he over-rates president Trump (I am in no way a Trump hater.) I think he is right-on on FDR, our most over-rated president.

[Don Incognito · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating the Presidents is an occasionally insightful, non-objective book that evaluates presidents from a consciously America-first viewpoint. Notes:

-Spencer doesn't have anything new or very interesting to say about the most famous presidents from the Revolutionary era, or Lincoln. That most of those presidents are highly rated is not surprising, because their actions put America first--of course. There's just not much to criticize about them from an America-first viewpoint.
-The book doesn't become very interesting until it reaches the second half of the twentieth century, when certain presidents made decisions that did not put America first, and even blatantly harmed it.
-The post-World War II presidency that I learned the most about was unquestionably Eisenhower's.
-As I read Spencer's evaluation of the Eisenhower administration, reading between the lines and drawing my own conclusions, there are strong hints that of most presidents, Eisenhower as a man was unusually open-minded and willing to evolve in views. Unfortunately, that appears to have happened only at the end of his presidency and afterward. Earlier in his presidency, he explicitly called himself a progressive and denigrated non-progressive Republicans; and there is a very strong case, implicitly made here, that Eisenhower arguably originated the concept of the big-government Republican. The most telling thing I learned about him is that, according to Spencer, Eisenhower (who famously was courted by both parties) ran as a Republican mainly because he came from a Republican family. But after the end of his presidency, he made a strong statement questioning the wisdom of giving the federal government increased size and power.
-The other possibility for being the first big-government Republican was Herbert Hoover twenty-five years earlier. However, as another of my personal conclusions, I believe Hoover was even less meaningfully Republican than Eisenhower, and therefore doesn't count. Evidence? Very strong: the fact that before running for president, Hoover had been neither Democrat nor Republican, and (states Spencer) ran as a Republican only because he believed the Democrats' popularity had been too badly damaged by the unpopularity of the Woodrow Wilson presidency. Hoover would be considered a "liberal" Republican today, highly progressive and interventionist; politically the complete opposite of his predecessor, Calvin Coolidge (who had no use for him).
-Therefore, consider that from the beginning, these two originators of the archetype of the big-government Republican had dubious credibility as being Republicans in the first place: one choosing the party largely due to family history, the other choosing the party out of crass political expediency.

The reason I gave the book only three stars is because it's a polemic, valuable but obviously intended to prove a point. Also because it's not particularly deep. On certain presidents, Spencer has relatively little insight. The fact that I learned the most about the Eisenhower presidency is probably just as much because my knowledge of presidential history is not good enough.

Now off I go to re-read this book, hoping to determine to what extent the above was because I didn't read thoroughly or closely enough.

[Steven Yoder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spencer rates the Presidents on whether they follow the Constitution and put America first rather than rating them by the wars and new programs they start.