A Gallup survey found that people will think that former President Joe Biden will be viewed as the worst commander-in-chief since Richard Nixon.
The poll shows that many Americans think Biden’s term will be remembered negatively compared to recent presidents. The poll may give us a clue about how history will remember Biden by showing how people felt about him at the end of his presidency and the problems he had to deal with during his term, like the economy, geopolitical wars, and extreme political division.
People were asked to rate how they thought a president would be remembered in history: “As an outstanding president, above average, average, below average, or poor?”
The study showed that Biden got a net score of -35 among adults in the U.S.
Six percent overall rated Biden as “outstanding,” 13 percent rated him “above average,” 26 percent “average,” 17 percent “below average,” and 37 percent rated him “poor.”
For Nixon, only four percent rated him as “outstanding,” eight percent “above average,” 28 percent “average,” 24 percent “below average,” and 30 percent “poor.
Thomas Gift, a political scientist who runs the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London (UCL) told Newsweek that Biden is leaving office with a barrage of scandals and failures.
“The legacies of U.S. presidents almost uniformly improve with the benefit of hindsight. The same will hold true of Biden. While the myriad challenges of this administration, from a disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal to deep-seated inflation, are top of minds for Americans now, more distance from Biden’s tenure will provide a richer appreciation also of its accomplishments,” Gift said.
“These include reinvigorating the NATO alliance, guiding the country out of the depths of COVID-19, and passing a major infrastructure bill that eluded his predecessors,” Gift added.
Emeritus Professor of United States History at UCL Iwan Morgan made similar comments.
Presidents do tend to be better regarded following the passage of time rather than when they leave office. Dwight Eisenhower fared badly in the early 1960s polls taken shortly after he left office but is now thought of as ‘near great’ by most historians and has a top ten ranking,” Morgan said.
“Jimmy Carter also does far better in this new poll than he did back in 1980, when few thought him outstanding and above average, but his postpresidential good deeds have apparently changed assessments of his leadership in office,” Morgan added.
Morgan continued, “Biden’s low rating is not surprising given his poor approval ratings in office and the sense that the country was on the wrong track. In reality, however, Biden’s economic record stands favorable comparison with every president since Clinton and he has presided over an era of peace once he extricated the U.S. from Afghanistan, however shambolically.”
Earlier this year, Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy blasted those who helped cover up Biden’s deteriorated mental status for years.
Doocy’s comments came following a bombshell Wall Street Journal report that cited more than 50 sources who claimed that not only has Biden’s mental capacity been suspect since before his 2020 election victory, but that staffers and those close to him have literally covered up how bad it was for his entire term.
Doocy, filling in on Fox & Friends Weekend on Saturday, pointed out that none of his colleagues in the White House press briefing room raised questions about the detailed WSJ report after it was published this week.
The report featured accounts from numerous Democratic aides, lawmakers, and donors expressing long-standing concerns over President Biden’s mental acuity and age, according to Mediaite.
“There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed,” the WSJ report said.
The report’s most striking revelations included claims that meetings were often canceled on Biden’s “off days” and that one-on-one interactions with him were deliberately minimized.
Doocy called the revelation that Biden’s been mentally incapable of being president the “biggest cover-up” in Washington, D.C., since Watergate.
We have another story that’s near and dear to my heart. It has to do with the White House press briefing room. Yesterday there were zero questions about this huge Wall Street Journal story that cites 50 people familiar with, apparently, the biggest cover-up in Washington since Watergate,” Doocy said on Saturday.
“The story, it was 18 pages long when I printed it, but the gist is that there were staff, unelected White House staff, who knew during the last campaign and transition that President Biden might be diminished, and they actively worked to hide that information from the American public,” he continued.
“And we don’t know what it necessarily means for his decision-making, but this is a huge story, and somehow there was no curiosity, and our colleague, Jacqui Heinrich, was in the room. She was not called on. I have a source familiar that this was on her list,” Doocy added.
Doocy observed that most questions during the briefing focused on Congress and the impending government shutdown, which was ultimately averted at the last minute. He mentioned that his colleague, Fox correspondent Heinrich, had planned to ask about the Wall Street Journal report, and he would have done the same if he had been present in the room.
