Historian takes on Ben Shapiro's Presidential Tier List

welcome back everyone well some of the most popular content on this channel tends to be the stuff i do surrounding the us presidents for whatever reason and myself included in this uh we find them interesting we find their stories interesting we find talking about them to be interesting and one of the most popular things that i've done lately was my tier ranking of u.s presidents both the one i did solo and then of course the four hour live stream i did with mr beat also very popular on this channel of course are the reaction videos so i'm going to combine those elements today and i'm going to do something that i probably a few months ago wouldn't have touched but i'm feeling a little frisky these days so we're going to take a look at ben shapiro in his ranking of the u.s presidents the tier rankings and i'm just going to make some observations and tell you what i agree with what i disagree with listen it's no secret i make no secret of the fact that i am politically conservative uh and i know that he is too i don't always agree with everything he says or with you know anybody listen never take you make the mistake of pigeonholing someone into a category because they lean one direction you know not every conservative voted for or supports donald trump not every liberal voted for or supports joe biden or voted for or supported barack obama people are complicated people have many layers to them and you know when you start making assumptions about a person you know that's a mistake i think but by and large i probably would at least in my assumptions think that i'll agree with a lot of his picks but i'll be curious to see what we have to say here so let's dive in and take a look at ben shapiro's president's tier ranking in american history before we jump in this video is sponsored by ring on this tier list we have five tiers we have s which i suppose stands for superior since it's at the top of the list and then we have a b c and f now i'm really missing the letter d here i will admit to you because there are a bunch of presidents here i think are actually d but because they are d i'm going to put them in the f category we'll get to those that's kind of an interesting decision or i don't know if he doesn't know how to add d or if he removed it on purpose or what but i don't know i feel like f should be reserved for like the worst of the worst you know the woodrow wilsons and the andrew johnsons and the james buchanans of the world there are some that are d that like weren't awful weren't complete disasters that just were maybe very ineffective i disagree in a moment so let's start with the presidents who are at the very tip top of the list of presidents in the history of the united states so interesting he's going to just kind of rank them like go with all the ones he thinks that's an interesting way to do it on the top of the list george washington our first president country together left office peacefully the father of the country a great man easy pick right george washington as number one and then everybody knows that the other president the only two presidents in this top tier there are not three okay i know the left thinks fda's gonna say lincoln i know some people on the right think that reagan's in that top tier neither one of them are washington or lincoln lincoln is the other guy in that top tier beyond simply leading america through the civil war and uh to a new birth of freedom it was lincoln who as a as a thinker helped to revivify the idea that the declaration of independence was an inherent part of the constitution of the united states that the two were inseparable the ideas of liberty were not restricted to the declaration of independence as a non-operable piece of legislation but yeah i yeah i get where he's saying and uh can't disagree with any of that listen uh everything that happens through the first 15 presidents of the united states uh every one of them had to deal with the slavery issue lincoln ended that of course after lincoln everybody has to deal with the civil rights issue that comes out of slavery so uh that problem was still there it just changed form i guess you could say but i wanna i don't disagree with either those picks it actually infused the constitution of the united states and the liberty principles were supposed to be extended it's interesting he's taking this long to talk about lincoln which means there's going to be a lot of people he doesn't spend a lot of time on to all people of the united states not merely white americans so for that reason abraham lincoln is top of the heap along with george washington so that's the easy part right that's that's what everybody does washington and lincoln are the two best presidents there's very little debate about this then things start to get kind of interesting so i'm going to sort of do this in um reverse order i'm going to start with the people who i think are just the worst president wilson johnson so let's begin with the president who i think was pretty easily the worst president of the united states yes without much of a question my man wilson wonder wilson is he okay so far i'm liking his tier list i'm sure there are gonna be some things i disagree with but ha ha you all know how much i hate woodrow wilson clear f woodrow wilson is garbagio woodrow wilson was a vicious racist who was in favor of radical expansion of the federal government he believed that the state should have no limits on it he was effectively a socialist he believes that the administrative government of the united states should be run top down by the elites he not only got us into world war one he then used world war one as a pretext to basically go after his political opponents with the sedition act woodrow wilson was a true and uh that was something that he had in common with john adams the whole sedition act um which was still on the books by the way the alienist edition act some of them had been repealed but some of that was still on the books going all the way back to adam's administration now i understand that um he's going to come at this from his political philosophy i tried to keep my political philosophy out of it um because i recognized that though i'm conservative there are times that very liberal presidents have been great presidents and not only great presidents but great for the country i don't know if he's able to separate those two and that's fine that's how he's coming at this i just approached it in a different way but it seems pretty clear that his hate for wilson my hate for wilson is much more about his character um his hate for wilson is much more about his policies horrible horrible horrible president and the fact that for a long time he was considered one of our better presidents speaks to how dumb america's historical class is let's talk about this because he still is considered one of the best by a lot of people now it's fair to say that as time goes on woodrow wilson is dropping down the list i chose to look just at c-span uh historian survey results because there are a lot of different surveys that have been been done with different groups of people this way we're looking at just what historians have to say which obviously historians have a particular slant too but right here you have abraham lincoln number one in the surveys that were done in 2000 2009 2017 2021 george washington consistently two franklin roosevelt consistently the last three he's been three theodore rose about four eisenhower has been climbing the ranks nine eight five and five truman stays right around five or six boy we had a great run of presidents there didn't we think about that franklin roosevelt dwight d eisenhower harry s truman john f kennedy all in the top eight uh and right in a row those four presidents boy it was a good run um but right here is woodrow wilson consistently uh he was as high as sixth in 2000 dropped to ninth in 20 2009 11 and now 13th and i have a feeling he's going to continue to go down that list as society changes as our view of things change a little bit the reason a lot of america's historical class likes him is because they again like the administrative state the administrative state for those who don't know that's the idea the executive branch really should run the government that the legislature is sort of a vestigial organ the president should be as woodrow wilson says as big a man as he can be as big a man as he's capable of filling in the office he was and honestly that that's a continuation of theodore roosevelt's idea of the bully pulpit and using the presidency to impose your will um so not really all that different than thinking of the time from other people big fan of how german government was run he was a big fan of the idea that the the government was sort of the bl end all was woodrow wilson awful awful person awful president he is definitely in the f category other presidents are in the end so this is where i really wish that there was like a a d category right here in in so he must have picked a tier list that didn't have a d and doesn't know how to add one but that's okay what would be the d category but we're going to have to push them into the f category because we really have no other choice there is no d category here uh lbj definitely goes in the category well and again this is he's going to be coming at this from uh his extreme conservative viewpoint in lbj if you are basing this on a conservative ideology that makes sense category i disagree obj awful president the sole bright spot in the lbj administration was a bright spot and that was the civil rights act the civil rights act which is exactly right on banning all sorts of but honestly i mean you got to give him credit for that and i think that in and of itself is enough to raise him out of f or d for me because this was a southern democrat at a time when southern democrats were opposed to civil rights uh and he had opposed that himself as a congressman and as a senator but he becomes president and he does the right thing whatever the man's character was he did the right thing at a time when a lot of southern democrats weren't doing the right thing state practices of discrimination is wrong when it comes to encroaching into private rights of association uh and and is wrong in some of its its broad outlines as far as how to deal with the private sector everything else is garbage the the extension of the welfare state is garbage the vietnam war and his strategy in pursuing the vietnam war with the graduated equilibrium horrible horrible garbage right so lbj terrible president he definitely goes in that bottom tier along with woodrow wilson other people who belong in that bottom tier and the much beloved fdr goes in that bottom tier and again this is going to be him coming from this uh in terms of his conservative leanings and i disagree strongly strongly with this one too i i don't like all of fdr's policies personally but i see how at the time given the situation with the great depression how some of those were were very helpful to the country and helped pick people up who were in very difficult situations and his leadership in in world war ii was fantastic other than the internment camps of japanese americans which i think we can all agree was abhorrent um but uh you know i i i'd never put him in f there's too much good that outweighs the bad again i'm looking at this from was he good for the country not do i agree with everything he did despite historians attempts to paint fdr as a wonderful president it's pretty obvious that he lengthened the great depression by as much as eight years according to his study from ucla anderson business school through his horrific economic policies he basically portrayed anybody who was not under his thumb as a quote unquote malefactor of great wealth he was a class warrior in the extreme which was kind of interesting because uh fdr came from a background of wealth and privilege he really didn't know much about economic policy like i'm glad that he was great on the radio but aside from his pursuit of world war ii uh that's pretty much it now this is i feel like and i've said this several times already i feel like he's so adamant about the the conservative principles here that he brushes aside anything that was actually good like and he said basically other than but then he mentioned something really really big like oh other than you know his leadership in world war ii he wasn't that great uh other than the civil rights act of 1965 lbj wasn't that great these are big big deals you can't just other than things like that by again that d category would have been good because fdr as a world war ii leader was good except for you know the whole unfortunate imprisoning 100 000 japanese americans in uh in camps that that was not so good but other than that not so good that's an understatement i wish that he were in that d category just like i wish that lbj were in that d category so we could at least recognize the good things they did alongside all the bad things but some people have fdr like the top tier presidents no effing way no way okay other presidents who belong in that bottom tier of presidents i'm put richard nixon in that bottom tier president i think nixon was a terrible president i know that a lot of republicans now again nixon probably on the more liberal side of republicanism back when republicans still had you know at that time uh each party had a conservative and a more liberal wing to it and actually for most of history it's been that way it's only been in the last few decades that the parties have become more extreme uh and haven't had as much wiggle room there's a little bit but when you do have somebody uh who you know joe manchin from west virginia for example who who's a democrat that's more conservative or a sue collins who's a republican who's a little more liberal from the northeast they get painted as this like terrible um betrayer of their party uh when for most of history the party had room for those sides of things and and yeah nixon was probably on the more liberal end of the republican party at the time but so were a lot of republican presidents have sort of a warm spot for nixon mainly because uh he was not george mcgovern but putting aside watergate which again is like the least of his sins considering that lbj bug barry goldwater's headquarters in 1964. he instituted price and wage controls he did not dismantle the vast government apparatus that was built by lbj in fact he exacerbated that he pursued the opening of china which has resulted in the rise of a dictatorial empire that now threatens american power in southeast asia so not not a big nixon fan i know there are a lot of people who are i'm not you could plausibly put them in the c category but yeah i'd probably put them closer and uh finally as the last person who goes in that f category well no so they're two more for the f category one is going to be um barack obama so so obama goes in the other game i think it's an awful this goes without saying i mean this is all about his political leanings uh there's no way barack obama goes on the same tier with woodrow wilson uh and i can't believe he hasn't thrown james buchanan and uh andrew johnson in this tier oh president i think he did horrific work mainly with regard to his rhetoric in terms of his legislation i think obamacare is an atrocity and i think that his spending plans with stimulus and raising us to four trillion dollar budget it's helped destroy the the economic future of the united states that's bad enough but between 2008 and 2012 barack obama morphed from a president who sort of campaigned on almost a clintonian third way as a guy who wasn't for red states and not blue states but the united states and in 2012 he went just for internationality anybody who opposes me is a racist america can be divvied into various victimized groups that can be cobbled together in a new rising ascendant majority i don't know how much of the whole anybody opposes me is racist thing you put on obama though i mean there were a lot of people who were saying that um but i don't remember him being the one saying that against the old america is extremely damaging and i think that that is going to be the future of american politics for quite a while i think the democratic party never quite got over the obama coalition of 2012 they've been trying to pursue it ever since and it has broken american politics in ways large and small so obama goes in that bottom category and then finally last guy who goes in that category is of course james buchanan seriously where is andrew johnson i don't even see andrew johnson on this list like unless there's more down below it seems like he skipped a lot of presidents who was the the president just before the civil war now to be fair i'm not sure the civil war happens because of james buchanan i don't think he doesn't stop it it was gonna happen buchanan just didn't do anything to stave it off he like just didn't do anything really um i think it was inevitable at that point so i'm not sure anybody would have done better in that situation but that are happening outside of buchanan's control doesn't mean he's a good president he was a terrible president okay so now we've got your top category we've got the the f category now we're going to do some people who are in the middle so in the a category which is just below us we'll put calvin coolidge so calvin cooley's really underrated president because calvin coolidge is the last president in american history to truly understand that the presidency should not be a major factor in your life and calvin coolidge was famously taciturn they used to call him silent cow there's a famous story about calvin coolidge where he was at some sort of dinner party and a reporter came up to him and she said to him you know president coolidge i've just made a bet with somebody and she said my bet is that i can make you say more than two words you lose you lose and that was sort of how cool i don't know if that's true that's one of those stories like william howard taft getting caught in the bathtub that probably aren't true but uh were used to make a point about someone but i agree calvin coolidge was probably the last president who did not really really use the executive to like force things to happen uh he was probably the last of uh people who had the philosophy that the executive was just there to facilitate things and not to change things or to force things to happen well it was but coolidge also had a wonderful understanding of the constitution and declaration of independence he gave a speech on july 4th and it's one of the great orations in american history about what america means and and why the foundational principles of the declaration of independence had led to the prosperity of the united states how the freedoms and liberties guaranteed to individuals that led to the prosperity of the united states that we were created by the declaration we were created by the constitution we do not get to create it it's really really good stuff one of the tragedies of american history is the coolidge stepped down and herbert hoover took over and herbert hoover was in fact quite a bad president yeah who else do we have here well put reagan in that a category and now reagan's big problem as a as a president was of course that he didn't get the spending under control he was also settled with the democratic senate from for part of his term in terms of breaking the back of inflation in the united states through his fed chief paul volcker in terms of radically lowering taxes in the united states and leading to two decades of growth in terms of escalating defense spending particularly on star wars and breaking the power of the soviet union ronald reagan goes near the top of the yeah and again coming from ben shapiro's uh philosophy on things honestly surprised he didn't make him an s but not surprised by a deep so he ends up with calvin coolidge who was one of his heroes by the way uh in that a category uh other presidents who end up in that a category probably have to put thomas jefferson in the a category for his his federalist view of american government what we would call federalist now meaning he wanted to develop more powers to the states also the louisiana purchase which is one of those uh yeah i was gonna say he was not a federalist the federalists were the ones who were for the strong central government he was what was first known as anti-federalist and then later known as democratic republicans the federalists were the alexander hamiltons of the world and the federalist party pretty much died out after john adams who was the last federalist president uh democratic republicans pretty much ran the show uh until for a while you had the whigs and then later the republicans weird moments in american history where he saw a good deal recognized he didn't have the constitutional authority to make it then went ahead and made it anyway but jefferson is widely regarded as one of our better presidents yeah i mean he's absolutely true and i've talked about this before thomas jefferson such a weird guy when it comes to his principles because he had very strong principles and yet when he became president had no problem breaking those principles if he thought it was something that was best for the country and and you know some could argue that that's a good thing that someone recognizes that even though they have principles sometimes they need to do that other people might criticize a decision like that uh but you know he's a guy who's against america have a stan having a standing army but he is the one who supervises the establishment of west point as our military academy uh to train officers for our standing army uh you know he's all about the federal government having as little authority and power as possible and yet he supervises the purchase of louisiana purchase which you know doubles the size of the united states territory uh so you know pretty interesting stuff but i agree with that ranking i'll put ulysses s grant i think in this in this category so there's been i wouldn't argue with vision about how ulysses s grant is portrayed in american history ulysses grant originally was portrayed as sort of a drunken sod lucked his way through the civil war and then into the presidency and then was responsible for the rise of pork politics and sort of gilded era corruption that's not really accurate if you're going to remember ulysses s grant's presidency for anything remember it for the fact that he presided over reconstruction and one of the great tragedies of american history is that reconstruction ends with ulysses s grant's term in office and i i will say this about the whole reconstruction thing american public approval of reconstruction public support was gone by the end of grant's administration so no matter who came next reconstruction was done uh so a lot of people blame rutherford b hayes coming in in 1877 and rutherfraud making his deal to pull the federal troops out and end reconstruction as part of his deal to get the votes to become president it didn't matter whoever got elected if samuel tilden had been elected the same thing would have happened so unfortunately and grant hated the fact that that was true he found himself in a position where it was harder and harder and harder to justify the use of federal authority in the south because people in the north were just tired of it and that's unfortunate because there was so much more work that needed done and uh jim crow really begins and and gains a serious hold and the kkk basically becomes a powerful force in the south after ulysses s grant leaves office revisionist historians are now now kind of looking back on the grant era and realizing that he was a stalwart defender of freedoms being extended to newly freed slaves in the south b presidents so people who are like okay you know kind of okay so i'll put jfk in well now you know i'm putting business c jfk goes is to see one of the more overrated presidents in american history obviously history has been more kind to jfk because of the assassination than and i agree with that and i've said that before um i i think i'd probably put him higher than that at least at a b uh just because his leadership i think in the cuban missile crisis was fantastic and one of the best moments in presidential history that 13 days during that crisis is one of the best two weeks of any presidency i think there's ever been he just handled that i think flawlessly that particular crisis um yeah there's a lot of things you could say about him negatively character-wise and otherwise but um but i do think that we tend to inflate his importance and how good he was because of how he died and because of the whole camelot ethos as they call it camelot um this ethos of the the young guy and his pretty wife and um you know how it was shattered and destroyed and he was you know i i do i think we do that with a lot of public figures that otherwise would have been the man was responsible for a wide variety of debacles during his first couple of years in office including the bay of pigs debacle however he was a fervent anti-communist who did cut taxes um but as far as him being like one of our better presidents i don't see any evidence of that by the way our our engagement in vietnam begins with with jfk to jump again with lbj let's see grover cleveland will put in the the category so grover cleveland the only president to serve twice non-consecutively grover cleveland uh was responsible for making sure the federal government did not outgrow what it was supposed to be he um famously rejected a stimulus package directed at texas drought relief saying that there is no constitutional warrant for this and grover cleveland i believe i want to take a look at this list but i believe had more vetoes in his first term than any other president in history in fact let's take a look at that okay so here are the list of vetoes by president and you can see here that grover cleveland in his first term in four years 304 regular vetoes as well as 110 pocket vetoes the pocket veto basically in simple terms the way it works normally in our government system is that when congress passes a bill it goes to the president the president can either veto it which means it does not become law unless congress votes to override the veto which requires uh two-thirds majority to do that but he can sign it and it becomes law or he can fail to sign it just do nothing and after 10 days it becomes law except in the case of pocket vetoes where if congress passes a law and then they're no longer in session then it's called a pocket veto because that means the president doesn't sign it and it basically fails to become law because congress not congress isn't in session to be able to enact it it's just kind of a weird quirk of our system uh and it was something that roosevelt used a lot in 12 years he had 635 total vetoes but in four years grover cleveland had 414 vetoes in his first term by far the most the only person who even comes close to that actually really nobody comes close to that in four years you can see in modern presidencies trump had 10 vetoes obama 12 george w bush 12 and of course you can look at how many times they were written grover cleveland was overridden only twice out of those 414 vetoes the only person who got overridden a lot was gerald ford 12 times and harry truman 12 times four that happened in what two and a half years uh so yeah that tells you a little bit more about those presidencies which is something you'd never hear from a president today he goes into the b category i'll put william howard taft in the same category william howard taft was a far more conservative figure than teddy roosevelt we'll get to teddy in just one second william howard taft uh was a sort of retrenchment of traditional republican values he went on to serve on the supreme court of the united states so sort of a figure that's been lost to history because and people make jokes about him because he was extremely fat but yeah probably one of the better ohio presidents we ohio we've got eight that we claim seven that were born here and then william henry harrison who got elected from ohio even though he was born in virginia but most of our presidents weren't necessarily all that stand out um we've had a few decent ones um grant being one of them but um yeah taft he he goes more conservative than his predecessor the man who hand picked him to be his successor theodore roosevelt who was a more progressive more on that kind of liberal wing of the republican party at the time taft got kind of swings back more moderate more to a little bit to the conservative side but still keep some of uh taft's policies going like going after the trusts and things like that but the truth is that he was actually a pretty good president and it had not been for teddy roosevelt and his ego trips then william howard taft would be more fondly remembered as the person who defeated woodrow wilson in 1916 and that's absolutely 100 true because if if theodore roosevelt had not decided and it's fair to argue it's an ego trip at that point uh roosevelt basically told the republican party if you don't nominate me over taft taft was the sitting president at the time and roosevelt runs against him he said if you don't nominate me i will run third party and wilson will win the election and that's exactly what happened theodore roosevelt is responsible for us getting woodrow wilson so it's tough to overlook that and and listen i love theodore roosevelt he's probably my favorite president but uh it frustrates me to no end that he did that um that's just a reality in 1912 rather which would have changed the course of american history for the better in a lot of ways um harry truman is a b president he tends toward the sea uh i might go ahead and be president because of his uh cold warrior nature um because of his handling of the end of world war ii i have a personal fondness as a jew for harry truman as virtually all american jews do because of his willingness to uh signal american support for the establishment of the state of israel the reason he doesn't rank higher on the list is because he had some dictatorial tendencies with regard to uh unions uh there there's a famous steel case in which he intervened in a fairly illegal way uh and then not only that his policy toward china was really bad he should have provided significantly more support to shanghai check in the face of the maoist revolution in china his failure to do so was instrumental in the rise of communist china also his handling of the uh his handling of the korean war left uh some things to be desired president trump i think i don't think i can strongly disagree with too much of that with truman though i do have truman as an a um i think i'd probably probably put more emphasis on um other areas of his presidency than than ben does but that's okay a b president now i think in terms of policy he'd be closer to an a i think in rhetoric the problem is that he's really been self-defeating the president i think most people understand this so he's had some real rhetorical highs i mean he gave a great speech mount rushmore for example that i talked extensively about he gave an excellent speech in poland talking about the defense of western civilization he said many great things in the culture war that i think are worthy of saying he's also said some incredibly wild and irresponsible things over the course of his presidency yeah um i i try to avoid modern stuff too much but i will say this i think donald trump was his own worst enemy um i think he probably would have gotten re-elected um had he not gotten in his own way that's all i'll say about it see uh he has led to less support for his agenda items that should be wildly more popular i mean the fact that he's not wrong heading into the election over 55 percent of americans said that they were better off than they were four years ago and then he performed at like 46 of them and normally if you're getting those kinds of numbers uh you should get reelected but popular vote there's only one reason for that and that's because he was so rhetorically irresponsible again on policies you got to put trump up with with people like ronald reagan and calvin coolidge in terms of rhetoric you got to put him much further down the list and so he ends up on average being in that b category he is not an f as so many people keep saying that that's ridiculous he is not even close to in the same category as uh as people like woodrow wilson for example i wouldn't put him at a b but i agree that you he he is nowhere near the woodrow wilsons and james buchanans of the world carter was enough jimmy carter was a garbage president so as always like all historians i forget jimmy carter jimmy carter was not a a good president maybe slightly better than people recall in the sense that he actually did try to bring down inflation in the latter years of his administration yeah yeah i think time will be kinder to jimmy carter i mean it's been some time i was he was president when i was born so it's been a while now but i think like would like how we see woodrow wilson 100 years later starting to be thought less of i think jimmy carter will probably be seen in a more favorable light as time goes by um we'll see so unsuccessfully but slightly better does not mean good he was still a horrible horrible president so horrible that he got himself blown out by ronald reagan he was largely considered uh by the media to be this sort of sort of jokey figure okay c presidents so i'm gonna put uh teddy roosevelt in the seat category again were there a d category he would be in the d category that's interesting and i and again i know this is this is ben shapiro's uh conservatism coming out and um like i said i'm conservative too but i'm trying to see this through the light of was he good for the country and he absolutely was theodore roosevelt's presidency i think was one of the best for the country that we've ever had you might disagree with him on policy but you can't disagree with the results teddy roosevelt was the first progressive president he foreshadowed woodrow wilson believed in the rise of the administrative state and this this massive federal infrastructure he pursued trust busting which was really an irresponsible policy driven by a populist need to break up big companies for no actual legal reason i will say this about the trucks bus thing it didn't really have the effect and i agree it was kind of a populist thing that people wanted to bring down to big companies because they started seeing these billionaires and these you know multi multi hundreds of millions of dollars being acquired by people and that had never really happened before on that scale so people were like what the heck what's going on and they saw how many people were living very poorly but uh the trust busting didn't necessarily fix that because for one thing you know guys like rockefeller it made him richer when they broke up his company uh so it didn't always have the effect uh but there was an issue with competition and stuff like that we've talked about that but listen some of the stuff he did that he used the federal government for it's hard to argue against the food and drug administration uh you know just basic health and safety type things and national parks and conservation i think everybody agrees those are good things and i i don't know i i don't think that teddy was a particularly good president uh he did have expansionist tendencies that definitely maximized the territorial holdings of the united states or at least protectorates of the united states but here's what i'll say about that and a little bit of um i think some hypocrisy on ben's part uh he raided thomas jefferson as an a who doubled the size of the country by purchasing land from napoleon uh and then he's going to criticize the expansionist tendencies of theodore roosevelt who during his presidency what did we really add panama and that we don't even have anymore it was just a temporary thing um i mean the philippines we were already kind of moving on by the time roosevelt takes office i don't know um but overall not a big teddy roosevelt fan james k polk is an oft-neglected figure he was responsible for widening the borders of the united states into oregon and and uh the beginnings of places like california in in recognizing the texas republic the mexican-american war he probably goes in the b category also the only so again talking about expansionists two the two presidents who added the most territory to the united states are polk and jefferson a and b but he criticized roosevelt and said he should have been a d and mentioned that as one of the same things i don't know seems a little fishy to me the president in american history to run for one term um and then win and pledge to the beginning i'm only going to be a one-term president and leave uh which honestly that that would be more of that would be good county college ended up doing that but i don't think he pledged to do that at the very beginning dwight eisenhower a lot of people would put him in like the a category i put him i would even put him as a c i'm not a big fan of dwight eisenhower's foreign policy i think the dwight eisenhower's foreign policy which was supposedly realist actually in many ways effectuated many of the problems that we see today in places like the middle east he supported the wrong side in the suez canal crisis uh he basically did nothing as the russians steamrolled the hungarians during the hungarian revolution in yeah but what was he gonna do at that point i mean i'm not sure what eisenhower could have done that might have changed what was happening in eastern europe or in the middle east at that time uh eisenhower again one of those ones that's consistently rated high i gave him an a uh in 56. yeah i'm i'm actually not a huge dwight eisenhower i feel like he's this is really kind of wishful thinking like i wish that he had done this when in practicality he as he said himself a realist uh would say really what else was he gonna do overrated and then finally in c presidents i'm going to put george w bush as a c-level president and that's largely because of the last three years of his administration he started off as a sort of compromise figure and then he became the the guy who led us through 9 11 in what i think was truly heroic fashion yeah and then by the end of his term when he was and i think everybody agrees with that his approval rating was like 90 in the aftermath of 9 11. i think both sides uh supported his leadership during that time a time when we needed people to get behind their leader uh and yeah i mean katrina comes along and you know a lot of the stuff that happens the last couple years was not good the recession um and unfortunately a lot of his um presidency is going to be judged by those things you know saying that we had to step in and save capitalism by by destroying capitalism and when he was not taking on the subprime mortgage crisis i think in a responsible way and the big problem for bush is that bush was never capable of explaining himself and sort of assumed that history would explain him for him and i just don't think that's ever a good strategy okay so there you have 20 all right so that's interesting and of course he didn't rank a lot of the presidents he only ranked certain ones and uh seems like he ranked a lot of republicans i mean how many democrats do we have here we've got grover cleveland and harry truman uh and polk so three democrats at b um i mean i guess jefferson's a democratic republican but that's before the democrat the modern democrat party jfk is a democrat and then you got woodrow wilson lbj fdr obama buchanan and carter all democrats so about what i would have expected from ben shapiro but let me know your thoughts uh about that let's try to keep it civil guys uh i'm venturing into uneasy territory by even reacting to this in the first place but let's please keep it civil keep it on on discussion by the time you guys see this i'm going to be on a cruise with my wife so i probably won't be responding to comments in real time very much but your comments are certainly welcome below thanks for watching

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 2,481,657

Keywords: ben shapiro, tier list, president of the united states, american presidents, us president, us presidents, tier ranking, ben shapiro debate

Id: UGFva8h3CEc

Length: 37min 48sec (2268 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2022