US President Donald Trump published a personal classification of American presidents, in which he placed himself alone in the highest rank under the title “The Greatest,” while he distributed a number of his predecessors to 5 other levels, in a list that sparked widespread interaction due to its choices and the absence of prominent names from it.
The classification that Trump published on his “Truth Social” platform on August 27 came within a pyramid scheme that begins with the “greatest” category, followed by “the greats,” then “semi-greats,” “average,” and “below average,” all the way to the last category that was labeled “losers.”
Trump placed himself, who is 80 years old, alone at the top of the rankings in the “Greatest” category, while he listed in the next rank 6 presidents that he considered to be “the greats,” namely Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson.
As for the “near-great” category, it included 4 presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, John Adams, and James Polk.
Trump placed 12 presidents in the “average” category, including Bill Clinton, John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, James Madison, William Taft, William McKinley, and Herbert Hoover.
In the “below average” rank, Trump listed 6 presidents, including Calvin Coolidge, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Zachary Taylor, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce.
As for the last category, which he called “losers,” it included his Democratic opponents, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, along with Jimmy Carter, and Republican presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Warren Harding.
The classification was also notable for the absence of the names of a number of the most prominent American presidents, including John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon Johnson, in addition to George Bush Sr. and George Bush Jr.
Trump’s post came after a CNN clip was circulated that covered a recent poll that showed that 53% of Republicans surveyed chose Trump as the Republican president they admire most, ahead of historical names in the party, including Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.
Comparisons between Trump and his predecessors are not new in his speech, as he has previously repeatedly spoken about his position among American presidents, and during the past months he has used artificial intelligence-generated images in which he appeared alongside a number of presidential and historical figures.
During his second term, Trump established in the White House what was called the “Presidential Walk of Fame,” which includes pictures of former US presidents and paintings covering their periods in office.
Last December, Trump added comments to a number of those paintings, including sharp criticism of Obama and Biden, in a reflection of the long political dispute between him and the two former Democratic presidents.
Trump’s new classification brought back controversy over the way in which his presidential record compares to the records of his predecessors, after he chose this time to place himself alone at the top of the list, above all the US presidents whose names were included in the classification.
