Trump Posts Presidential Rankings Declaring Him ‘The Greatest’

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

President Donald Trump declared himself “the greatest” president in U.S. history in a ranking he posted to Truth Social on Thursday — while leaving nearly a dozen of his predecessors off the list entirely.

The graphic divides the presidents into six tiers: “The Greatest,” “Great,” “Near Great,” “Average,” “Below Average,” and “Failures,” with Trump alone occupying the top category.

It appears to be an altered version of a presidential ranking published by LIFE magazine in 1948, based on a survey of 55 experts in American history. The version Trump posted largely preserves the original rankings and omissions, but adds three recent Democratic presidents to the “Failures” tier and Trump’s name to the top.

Screenshot via @realDonaldTrump on Truth Social

The “Great” tier includes Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson.

Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, John Adams, and James K. Polk are deemed “Near Great.”

Trump’s “Average” presidents are Bill Clinton, John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Madison, Martin Van Buren, William Howard Taft, Chester A. Arthur, William McKinley, Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover, and Benjamin Harrison.

John Tyler, Calvin Coolidge, Millard Fillmore, Zachary Taylor, James Buchanan, and Franklin Pierce fall into the “Below Average” category.

At the bottom, Trump’s “Failures” tier consists of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding, and Jimmy Carter.

Notably absent from the rankings are William Henry Harrison, James A. Garfield (who both died shortly after taking office), Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

On Wednesday, though, Trump invoked the younger Bush on Truth Social by posting an image contrasting the two presidents’ records, with Bush beside a sign reading “Mission Not Accomplished 2001-2021” and Trump looming over another declaring “Mission Accomplished 2026.”

The post appeared to cast Trump’s war in Iran as a success while portraying the two-decade U.S. war in Afghanistan, launched under Bush following the Sept. 11 attacks, as a failure.

Back in July, during an appearance on Second Lady Usha Vance’s podcast, Trump offered his own assessments of several past presidents while reading the children’s book Presidents Play! He called Johnson a “tough cookie,” Reagan “high quality,” and the two Bushes “the Bushies” — all four of whom are absent from his new rankings.

He also joked about Taft, whom he ranked “Average,” being the nation’s heaviest president, saying, “I have to be careful, ’cause I don’t want to supersede his record.”

UPDATE: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that Trump’s ranking seems to be an altered version of a 1948 LIFE magazine graphic.

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