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James Buchanan has set the bare extraordinarily high. To date, Trump still hasn't even topped Hoover.
This isn't in any way a defense of Trump, but modern Americans have this idea in their heads that every President in history was somewhere on spectrum of Bill Clinton and George Bush. The bitter truth is that the pre-FDR presidencies were so much fucking worse. Trump is right in line with your Andrew Johnsons and Zachary Taylors and Warren G. Hardings and Benjamin Harrisons. He is not exceptional in his awfulness. He is a reversion to the historical mean.
There's a difference between the three presidents.
Hoover was sadly trapped into an economic and political thinking that wasn't suited for the Great Depression. He tried to help the country, but the help was largely ineffectual or harmful. FDR's administration approached the Great Depression from a radically different point of view.
Buchanan was laughably incompetent, which was the style of the time for presidents before Lincoln. Buchanan didn't respond to active rebellion because he didn't think he could.
Trump is actively malicious. He is allowing for the gutting of civilian government under his watch while trying to shift taxation to a system he can control to bypass Congress. Not even Andrew Jackson was that brazen.
Hoover was a fascist to his bones and an egotistical maniac. He unleashed the military on strikers and labor organizers including the Bonus Army, imposed some of the most draconian immigration regulations of the era, and aided the Axis Powers in rebuilding and rearming with the help of his friends in the Bush family.
Far from trying to help, Hoover's immediate legacy was a rapid consolidation of wealth into the hands of Republican allied industries and agricultural magnets. The vicious economic squeeze ultimately lead to a surge of unemployment and a collapse in Republican popular support, humiliating Hoover in the midst of his demand for greater private philanthropy.
But this was in pursuit of corporate oligopoly. The efforts failed because the lumpen proles could no longer tolerate their collective immiseration. Not because Hoover lacked ambition.
Buchanan cultivated a Democratic Party of insurrection and normalized the bloody suppression of abolitionists. He did respond the active rebellion. John Brown's rebellion. And Harriet Tubman's rebellion.
But, like the Southern secessionists who would follow him, he underestimated the passion and the sincerity of their revolutionary convictions.