Now that President Donald Trump has been sworn into office, America can breathe a collective sigh of relief that the country is once again being governed by competent leadership.
The contrast between Trump and former President Joe Biden couldn’t be more distinct, and career politician Biden was arguably the worst president in American history. But who else should make that list?
Here’s Newsmax’s list of the top 10 worst — those who governed in ways that violated America’s ideals of freedom, equality, personal responsibility, and free-market capitalism. In other words, the most un-American presidents, listed in chronological order:
Franklin Pierce (1853 –1857):
Slavery was the hot-button issue of the mid-19th century, and Pierce fanned the flames by signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 into law. That created two new territories and permitted the voters of each to decide whether to be a slave state or a free state.
Adding yet more fuel to the debate, the Kansas-Nebraska Act also repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which would have banned slavery in those territories.
Slavery is perhaps the most un-American concept, as it clashes with the most-quoted phrase in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.”
James Buchanan (1857 - 1861):
If Pierce fanned the flames of tensions over slavery, Buchanan threw gasoline on the fire.
Although a Pennsylvanian, Buchanan sided with the Southern states when it came to slavery, and once remarked that his friend Chief Justice Roger Taney was about to settle the issue once and for all. Shortly after that, the Supreme Court delivered the Dred Scott decision, which declared that slaves were not citizens.
Andrew Johnson (1865–1869):
Johnson was Abraham Lincoln’s vice president during Lincoln’s brief second term and rose to the presidency upon Lincoln’s assassination. Johnson was the opposite of Lincoln.
Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, reaffirming the principle that “all men are created equal.” Four years later Johnson announced "This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” On that basis he opposed the equal protections established for all people under the 14th Amendment.
Johnson repeatedly locked horns with the GOP-controlled Congress over the issue of Reconstruction and became the first of three presidents to be impeached.
Woodrow Wilson (1913 - 1921):
Old habits, like racism, die hard, and a half-century after the Civil War, it arrived again in the White House. Despite the ratification of the post-Civil War’s 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, making equality the law of the land, Wilson segregated the federal government wherever possible.
Wilson’s most famous academic book, A History of the American People, actually defended the Ku Klux Klan, describing them as “men half outlawed, denied the suffrage, without hope of justice in the courts, who meant to take this means to make their will felt.”
Wrote Dylan Matthews for Vox, “Woodrow Wilson was, in fact, a racist pig. He was a racist by current standards, and he was a racist by the standards of the 1910s, a period widely acknowledged by historians as the ‘nadir’ of post–Civil War race relations in the United States.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933 - 1945):
If we’re going to attach the Dred Scott decision to James Buchanan, we should associate Korematsu v. United States to FDR, which addressed his un-American mass internment of Japanese Americans after the sneak attack of Pearl Harbor, pulling the United States into World War II.
When the courts ruled that FDR was exerting too much power, he tried to pack the Supreme Court by increasing the number of justices and filling the empty slots with like-minded, progressives. Congress saw through this and wouldn’t play along.
“But Social Security?” you may ask. Sure, FDR pushed the Social Security Act through Congress and signed it into law, but here’s another court case for you: Helvering v. Davis, which questioned the constitutionality of forced retirement plans. FDR’s DOJ lawyers argued that it wasn’t a retirement plan, but was a tax, and that the money collected belonged to the government.
Lyndon Johnson (1963 - 1969):
Yes, LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act, and that’s a good, even an American, thing. but his "war on poverty” through his vision of a “Great Society” made him sound more like a Communist than an American president.
He believed that if we threw enough money at a problem, it could be solved.
The result was to actually increase poverty, and most importantly, increase dependency on government handouts, and his “war on poverty” actually broke up families.
His prosecution of the Vietnam War was also dismal, and prevented him from seeking another term in office, but that’s not necessarily un-American — just ill-equipped.
Richard Nixon (1968 - 1974):
Nixon is the only president to have resigned from office before his term was up. He did so because of the escalating Watergate scandal. But that wasn’t his un-American fatal flaw. His Aug. 15, 1971 decision was.
On that day Nixon announced an immediate freeze on all wages and prices in an effort to combat inflation. Instead, he showed the nation his lack of faith in the free market system and demonstrated the danger of unchecked executive power.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman predicted at the time that the gambit would end “in utter failure and the emergence into the open of the suppressed inflation.”
It did. Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw explained that instead of easing the economy, “Ranchers stopped shipping their cattle to the market, farmers drowned their chickens, and consumers emptied the shelves of supermarkets.”
Jimmy Carter (1977 - 1981):
Carter’s heart seemed to be in the right place, but that didn’t translate into success.
He proved himself to be a weak leader, and took inflation from an already high 7.5%, to a staggering 13.5% when he left four years later. Gasoline prices doubled, and long gas lines became the norm.
He was especially weak on the world stage, seeking a “peaceful coexistence” with our enemies, resulting in revolutionaries taking over the U.S. embassy in Iran and taking embassy personnel hostage.
All of this was the result of bad management — not necessarily un-American. His un-American side came out in his post-presidential years — his hatred of Israel, at that time our closest Mideast ally, today arguably our most loyal ally period.
His book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, suggested that Israel was an apartheid nation. Wrote Philip Klein for National Review, “His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him.”
He also actively meddled in the first Gulf War, without permission from then-president George H.W. Bush, and flew into North Korea with a CNN TV crew, without then-President Bill Clinton’s OK, believing only he could end a standoff between the United States and North Korea.
Hatred of our allies and meddling in international affairs were un-American activities.
Barack Obama (2009 - 2017):
Today’s racial and political division can be traced to one man: the 44th president.
“It began when his Justice Department dropped an open-and-shut voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party,” wrote Hans von Spakovsky for The Heritage Foundation. “It was essentially a declaration that his administration would use the Voting Rights Act to protect only certain races.”
From that point on, Obama turned every issue into a racial issue. Whenever possible everything was literally black and white — and the people felt it.
A 2016 CNN/ORC poll indicated that 54% of Americans believed that race relations worsened under Obama.
In addition, when Obama rammed through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, patients were less protected, medical insurance was unaffordable, and America got one step closer to a single-payer healthcare system, which always ends up in rationed health care.
Racial division and socialized medicine are definitely un-American values.
Joe Biden (2021 - 2025):
Biden’s accomplishments in his four years include:
- COVID vaccination mandates for the military
- Crippling inflation
- Middle East chaos leading to war
- Russian invasion of Ukraine
- Border crisis
- Woke military
- Escalating crime
- Supply chain crisis
- Botched Afghanistan withdrawal
- Tax hikes
- China’s puppet
- IRS expansion
- Freak show cabinet
During Biden’s four years in office, he also spent more than 40% of the time on vacation. That equates to 48 years worth of normal worker vacation time squeezed into four years. Although laziness is un-American, in Biden’s case things could have been worse if he’d been on the job more.
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