Well, imho, we need a few decades to properly evaluate the “worst” label.
There were the fellows who tried — Eisenhower (Identified the Military Industrial complex) and Regan (Couldn’t control the Congressional spending).
There was Carter whos was merely incompetent; not evil.
Bush41 reneged on “read my lips, no new taxes”.
Clinton was too busy with intens to kill or capture Bin Laden; that might have prevented 9/11. Clinton (“I did not have sex with that woman” and parsing the word ‘is’) set a new low for personal conduct. And, was a negative moral influence on a generation.
Bush43 was another incompetent big G socialist.
Now we can get into the competition for the “worst”! Runners up:
Wilson, who campaigned on peace, instituted the draft, signed the Federal Reserve act, and immediately led us into WW1 which set the table for WW2.
FDR, who maneuvered us into WW2 via Pearl Harbor and entrenched Socialistic Big Government.
Truman who dropped the A-bomb on civilians.
BUT, the “worst” has to be Lincoln.
(1) The War of Northern Aggression. What you call the Civil War. What some call the Second American Revolution. There is no Constitutional, legal, or moral justification for this war on “his” own citizens. That alone would rocket him too the top of the list.
(2) Income tax to pay for that war. Government debt too. And, a draft for poor folks to fight the war; rich people could buy their way out.
(3) Freedom of Press savaged when editors dared to criticism him.
(4) Atrocities against civilian populations like Sherman’s “March to the Sea”.
(5) Single handedly destroying the concept of a Union of Equals amd morphing into the USA as the tyrant state.
And, don’t forget, he want to send all the “Negros” back to Africa. A racist among his other “endearing” qualities.
Slavery was a smokescreen! It wasn’t about slavery. The rest of the world, for the most part, eliminated slavery peacefully. At the time of the war, there had been plans to buy all the slaves and free them. It was a labor model that was unsustainable.
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Reinke Faces Life 