by MATTHEW STEVENSON
PHOTO/Jake Cunningham/CC by 2.0
Although Donald Trump has only been in office for a few weeks, it is hard to go anywhere and not hear that he is the worst ever American president. Neither Richard Nixon nor Warren Harding, or even the thirty days of William Henry Harrison’s pneumonia, are believed to rank in his bottom-feeding percentile. But if Donald is that bad, it may go down as his greatest achievement.
I grant you that Trump has the potential to be great on the worst-ever scale. It is no small accomplishment that his national security adviser did not last three weeks on the job and was run out of town for pillow talking with the Soviets. (I was reminded of the last scene in No Way Out, when Kevin Costner starts speaking Russian.)
Domestically, Trump has a lot to offer with his denigration of women, minorities, immigrants, and Muslims. That said, his racist attitude only puts him in a league with Woodrow Wilson (fond of the n-word) and Teddy Roosevelt (who liked to brag that his government had hired fewer Negroes than did William McKinley). Further out on the spectrum are the twelve slave-owning American presidents (from Washington to Grant), who will be tough to bring down.
As someone ethically challenged, Trump brings a lot to the table. He’s worked Atlantic City casinos and fondled Miss Universe contestants. Both avenues show promise. And before assuming office, Trump put his labyrinthine business interests (including, presumably, dividend checks from sheikdoms) into a revokable trust and staffed it with his inflatable-doll sons.
But the jury might be out for a while if it has to decide whether Trump University or Trump Steaks (“Believe me — I understand steaks, it’s my favorite food!”) are as bad as Grant’s dallying with Credit Mobilier, Harding’s drain from Teapot Dome, or the Clinton Foundation.
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In terms of international affairs, and ignorance thereof, I grant you that Trump could—as they say at the Olympics—“go podium,” especially if he keeps finding the likes of Michael Flynn to advise him on national security or continues to think of foreign relations as a variation on Caribbean hotel development (E pluribus condominium).
Keep in mind that making a hot mess of American foreign policy is something presidents do well. Most left the world in worse shape than they found it.
For example:
—Washington set the gold standard early, getting rolled by the British with the Jay Treaty, but then Jefferson punted on the same impressment issue, leaving it to James Madison (a brave man, by the way) to fight a war with England.
—Both James Polk, with his invasion of Mexico, and William McKinley, in his liberation of Cuba, wanted to make the world safe for American imperialism, although often their instrument of war was massacre.
—With the Treaty of Versailles, the pious Woodrow Wilson condemned Europe to another world war. (Referring to Wilson’s Fourteen Points, French President Georges Clemenceau whispered: “God only needed ten.”)
—Then there are all those presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Nixon who decided that American blood and treasure were best consigned to a rat hole in Indochina, the example of which allowed later presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to play dominoes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So for Trump to be among the worst in foreign affairs, he will have to be very bad.
Getting embroiled in a Russian blackmail scandal would help, for sure, but somehow those rumored Moscow sex tapes—with Russian hookers in a former Obama presidential suite—sound more like KGB revenge porn than another shadow over Blooming Grove.
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Sexually speaking, with two messy divorces and a triple-double in groping, Trump clearly merits consideration as a world-class predator, certainly someone who could hold his own with Bill Clinton as a fondler or Lyndon Johnson, who liked to say: “I’ve had more pussy by accident than Kennedy had by design.”
Still, I am not sure how Trump would fare in an extramarital playoff with, say, John F. Kennedy (who on most days needed to be with a woman who was not his wife) or Warren Harding, who while president had a love-child stashed away on the Jersey Shore and made love to Nan Britton on the floor of a White House closet.
For now, despite his blatant sexism, Trump probably belongs in a womanizing category somewhere between Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland.
Before becoming president Wilson had a torrid affair with a Mrs. Mary Peck, who he had met in Bermuda, and while running for office in 1912, Wilson’s henchmen were dispatched to buy up a huge collection of love letters.
Trump might, however, find more common cause with fellow New Yorker Grover Cleveland, who was prone to dalliances, some of which involved unwelcome aggression.
According to a new biography, when living in Buffalo, Grover had his way forcefully with 38-year-old Maria Halpin, who became pregnant and delivered the baby that Cleveland might well have fathered.
Although Cleveland’s moniker was “Grover the Good,” he responded to Halpin’s demands for child support by having the baby put in an orphanage and committing the mother to a lunatic asylum, which in presidential history is up there with Hillary Clinton slut-shaming some of Bill’s conquests.
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