Politics Thread

John Tyler? The dude whose own cabinet rebelled against him? lol. But he gave us the great state of Texas. He accomplished something, unlike Trump.

Lol, yes that John Tyler, the sniveling little weasel whose biography is basically that he yelled about state's rights his entire career and somehow ended up on the ticket with Harrison, who died a month into his presidency and Tyler ascended to the position.

He was awful and insignificant, but like you said he did annex Texas right before he left office. Though you could also argue that because of Tyler, we now have Ted Cruz so...

Good point, it was really Polk that actually finalized everything. Tyler's presidency is really just marked with an incredible inability to get anything done since he alienated everyone in politics including the Whigs that got him there.

But yeah truly a terrible person siding with the Confederacy. I think he's the only president buried without the American flag?

Van Buren was an interesting figure. Basically inherited all of Jackson's biggest failures (Indian Removal Act and Panic of 1837) and only made each of those worse.

New York gave us Donald Trump. Let’s not go down this road.

No, and in my mind it's not even close. Trump is a traitor to this country as well, and did it WHILE HE WAS PRESIDENT. He also sided with neo-Nazis and has made numerous statements about the "importance" that his base cherishes regarding the Confederate flag.

So basically if Trump were president during Tyler's time, he would probably be way, way, way worse and even more blatantly racist and traitorous than he is today!

Well the thing about presidential rankings is that, looked at a certain way, even the best presidents of the early days of the republic still had policy positions that would be abhorrent today (e.g. slavery), and looked at from that perspective there are a number of presidents who could be said to be significantly worse than Trump at least on a policy level.  But those people were basically in step with the level of progress of their times whereas Trump seems like a uniquely regressive figure in a way that, say, John Tyler was not.  What's more he's a uniquely corrupt and self-serving figure in a way that would make even Richard Nixon and Warren G. Harding blush and incompetent in ways that even idiots like George W. Bush and Franklin Pierce weren't. 

That goes without saying. Context matters.

You can say the same for Hoover. He inherited the Great Depression. His failure was doing something about it. But Calvin Coolidge, who was popular in his day, gets off scott free even though he was the President during the Roaring 20’s excess that led to the depression.

Except for Polk

James Buchanan and Trump have a great deal in common.  Buchanan attributed to an insurrection on the government, a little dust up called the US Civil War.  He liked the idea of being President, but didn't want to actually do any governing.  Since there was no cable news in those days, he spent most of his time playing cards with his lackeys.  On the rare occasions when he did get involved, it was always to do something horrible.  He was a racist, publicly supporting the Supreme Court's notorious Dred Scott decision that said blacks weren't citizens and therefore had no rights.  He made sure that when Kansas was granted statehood, it entered as a slave state.  There was a major collapse of the national economy during his administration, known as the Panic of 1857.  After Lincoln won the election and talk of secession went into overdrive, Buchanan made a speech in which he said states couldn't leave the US, but also said that the Federal government lacked the power to stop states from leaving.  He also blamed Northerners for all the trouble and said that their actions justified whatever response Southerners chose.

Yes and sort of. We can’t ignore Fillmore & Pierce. They certainly set the stage for Buchanan. I’m in agreement with Dracula & SnoBorderZero that 1849 to ‘61 were a particularly dark period in American politics. Starts with Zachary Taylor.