C-Span Survey of Presidential Historians - Rankings

Link: Total Scores/Overall Rankings | C-SPAN Survey on Presidents 2021 | C-SPAN.org

There are lots of interesting things to see here but I thought it was relevant to the discourse about Sam's Trump Derangement Syndrome, and whether he became obsessed or whether he was reacting rationally by spending so much time explaining his view on him. Every tweet sam put out for years remotely related to the administration was inundated with "what happened to you?", "Trump broke your brain", "this is what TDS does to a person", etc.

This survey includes 142 historians, professors and other professional observers of the presidency selected by C-SPAN to give marks on 10 different metrics and then gives an overall mark to grade their leadership and compare them against one another.

Overall Trump comes in at position 41 out of 44 in terms of his overall mark.

His worst marks are:

#44 on Administrative Skills

#44 on Moral Authority

#43 on International Relations

His best marks are:

#32 on Public Persuasion

#34 on Economic management

#36 on Vision/Setting an agenda

This is by no means absolute proof of anything and is an appeal to authority, but it does give some kind of indication that the consensus of experts was that Trump was an extreme deviation from normal in a negative direction and that the extra focus on him by Sam wasn't caused by brainworms or giving into liberal hysteria. He could be wrong but he is just as wrong as the consensus of presidential historians which makes the specific ire against Sam seem odd.

Separate from the above, the other interesting aspects to the survey in comparison to prior surveys that I see are that Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Jackson have steadily moved down the list, Obama has broken into the top 10, and George W Bush has rapidly moved up the list from very low to now being closer to the middle.