President Donald Trump appears preoccupied with slapping his name on things these days. And on Thursday, that involved slapping it atop a ranking of presidents.
Trump shared an image on social media that declared himself “the greatest” president — better than even George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
It’s not clear where the list came from, but it does not seem as though great care went into assembling it. There are a bunch of problems with it — beyond, of course, putting a president with a mid-30s approval rating at the top. (CNN has reached out to the White House about the list.)
And for a president who has growing problems with his conservative base, his posting of this list could confirm some of their reservations about him.
Let’s run through the issues.
FDR, Wilson and Jackson as ‘great’
A number of conservatives cried foul at including this trio alongside Washington, Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, after all, was the father of the New Deal and oversaw the greatest expansion of the federal government in US history.
Woodrow Wilson might engender even more distaste on the right for presiding over his own expansion of government, including enacting the federal income tax. Conservative columnist George Will has said Wilson “ruined the 20th century.”
Andrew Jackson is one of two presidents Democrats used to name their fundraising dinners after — though they moved away from that in recent years due Jackson’s owning of slaves and treatment of Native Americans.
And Trump seems to want a mulligan on at least one of them. By Friday morning, he posted a different graphic that demoted Wilson from “great.” In the new one, Wilson is listed among five presidents who “broke” America.
For conservatives, this is basically the inverse of ranking Wilson as “great.”
Calvin Coolidge is considered a vastly underappreciated president on the right, and even a conservative icon. He’s lionized for his fierce opposition to the kind of big government progressivism that marked Wilson’s and FDR’s presidencies.
Some even credit “Silent Cal” for the rise of modern conservatism.
Andrew Johnson as ‘average’
Johnson is often considered among America’s worst presidents, owing in large part to his incompetent handling of Reconstruction after the Civil War. He was also impeached.
The Siena Research Institute Survey of US Presidents, which frequently surveys experts, has ranked Johnson dead last among the presidents for the last 20 years.
It would be interesting to know why Trump might see Johnson as, in fact, not so bad.
It would seem William McKinley has been demoted in Trump’s mind. That’s because the president spent much of 2025 talking about how “great” McKinley was and hailing him as an example of how tariffs can make America great.
Trump even restored McKinley’s name to a mountain in Alaska because he was such “a great president.”
“McKinley was a great president who never got credit,” Trump added in July 2025.
Now he’s among those apparently not giving him credit.
While Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency is not as well-regarded as his time leading the Union to victory in the Civil War — and he certainly wasn’t a natural politician — “failure” seems rather harsh.
GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas in a 2022 op-ed labeled Grant “one of the greatest civil-rights presidents in our nation’s history” and accused liberals of besmirching the reputation of an “American hero.”
“This sloppy and slanderous history thankfully has been reassessed in recent years, for Grant deserves to stand forever alongside Lincoln and Washington as one of America’s indispensable men,” Cotton wrote.
Cotton may not like seeing Trump participate in such treachery.
One of the biggest problems with the graphic is that it doesn’t bother to rank a bunch of presidents.
There’s no Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman and neither of the Presidents Bush.
Why might this be?
Well, the graphic appears substantially similar to one that appeared in Life magazine in 1948.
The only differences are that Trump has been added in a new “greatest” category, Bill Clinton has been added to “average,” and Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter have been added to “failures.”
So why add these presidents but not other modern ones? It’s a good question! It’d be fascinating to see where Trump would rank George W. Bush, Reagan and Nixon.
Also a good question: Why did Clinton escape the same fate as fellow Democrats Biden, Obama and Carter? Why is he ranked above Coolidge?
Maybe Trump still has a soft spot for Clinton.