Victor Davis Hanson Reveals How He’d Rank Trump, Biden Among US Presidents

Victor Davis Hanson ranked President Donald Trump in the top five of best U.S. presidents and former President Joe Biden among the worst three presidents when he joined Mark Levin Saturday night. 

“I think [Trump] is in the top five because he’s not waging a revolution as he’s accused. He’s waging a counterrevolution,” said Hanson, a senior contributor for The Daily Signal, on Levin’s Fox News show “Life, Liberty & Levin.”  

Trump isn’t just focused on fixing issues in politics, he’s working on everything from the border to the Smithsonian museums to the universities, Hanson explained. 

“I don’t think we’ve ever had a president that looked at 360 degrees and said the country needs to be brought back radically to the middle or it’s going to be destroyed,” Hanson said. “And he’s done that in the first 10 months in an extraordinary way.” 

A big part of Trump’s success is that he learned a lot from his first term, Hanson said. In his first term, “he didn’t look at the resumes” and was instead handed “a lot of illustrious names” which ended with many people “thwarting him.”  

This time, Trump had four years to ponder these things all “while he was a victim of this lawfare and other things,” Hanson said.  

Trump focused on getting people in his administration “who are force multipliers,” and he’s “consciously, deliberately, [and] carefully” worked to “redirect almost everything about American life that the progressives had altered radically the last 30 years,” Hanson explained. 

One of the most striking things about Trump is that he actually stopped the progressive project compared to every Republican before him who has only tried to “alter” and “slow down” the  progressives’ work, Hanson said. 

“I can’t think of any other major Republican candidate or president who would’ve taken on that,” Hanson said. “The Bush’s didn’t do it, and John McCain wouldn’t have done it. Romney wouldn’t have done it, Bob Dole wouldn’t have done it.”  

Biden Near the Bottom 

Biden is “in the bottom three” with Millard Fillmore and James Buchanan because he wasn’t “really intellectually or cognitively aware of his surroundings,” Hanson said.  

“I think there was a cabal of former Obama people—and his staff, his wife, his family—that were running the country,” Hanson said.  

Biden “was a useful tool” that was used in 2020 to stop the openly radical candidates like Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination, putting on a front that he was “a moderate so they could push an even more radical agenda.”  

“He’s a special case, and I mean that in a negative fashion,” Hanson said. “So in some ways I think he was the worst president—if he was a president. I think he was a president that never was.”

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