“Morning Joe” celebrated Presidents’ Day by discussing a recent ranking of U.S. Presidents via a survey of historians, which places Joe Biden in 14th – ahead of Ronald Reagan – and Donald Trump “dead last.”
The New York Times published an article, based on data from the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project, saying that although Biden is not performing well in polling, he “can take solace from one survey in which he is way out in front of Mr. Trump. A new poll of historians ranks Mr. Biden as the 14th best president in American history, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan and Ulysses S. Grant.”
Peter Baker, who penned the piece for the Times, joined the “Morning Joe” panel to discuss the rankings.
“Every president is appealing to two constituencies. One of course is the American public because you don’t want to be president unless you get their support. But the other is history,” Baker said. “Every single president of course has his eye and eventually her eye on where they are in history, what mark they’re going to leave.”
Biden has a desire to make his mark, so this polling “is a little bit gratifying,” to his administration, Baker added.
“Now, can you genuinely measure an incumbent president’s place in history when he’s not even done?” Baker asked rhetorically. “Of course not.”
Baker noted that Biden’s legacy will be determined in part by whether he wins the election this fall saying, “If he loses this fall and ushers Donald Trump back into the presidency, that will definitely affect his story.”
“What it says is that they are respecting him for having ousted Trump in the first place,” the Times’ White House correspondent continued. “And trying to restore the Presidency, and the country to a certain degree of normalcy.”
“It also says something about Donald Trump, of course, is that he’s dead last,” Baker noted. “They considered even worse than James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, and the other sort of 19th century, you know, failures who got us into the Civil War and mismanaged it afterward.”
