Day: June 23, 2019

This is brought up from another thread.

The Siena Scholars Poll put together their 2018 results, and they rank Trump ahead of Andrew Johnson and Buchanan, but behind Harding and Pierce.

One other commenter noted that they rank Trump the dumbest, the crookedest and with the worst appointees.

I guess that could be, but I just don’t know enough about all those 19th century presidents to offer an opinion. Who the hell knows about all the nominees of Franklin Pierce except scholars who specialize in the Presidency? Perhaps not even them. Maybe it would have to be scholars who specialize specifically in Franklin Pierce.

Frankly, I have some problems with these scholars not knowing as much as they should. The first thing that catches my eye in this table is their rating of the Presidents by intellect. This is something I have studied in some depth, although I am just an amateur historian. The most obvious glaring error is their ranking of John F Kennedy at #11 and James A Garfield as #20.

Kennedy was a very witty man who could think well on his feet, and was above average in intelligence compared to the general population, but was probably below average in Presidential intelligence, very likely near the bottom. We have a very good grasp on his IQ and George W. Bush’s, for example. Although Kennedy could be eloquent as well as witty in public, while Bush had a poor presentation style that made him appear to be perpetually befuddled, Dubya actually had a significantly higher IQ than JFK.

Garfield, on the other hand, may have had the most powerful intellect of any man ever to hold the office. He was certainly in the same league as Jefferson, the Adamses, Madison, Wilson or anyone else. The most famous story about him is that he knew both Latin and ancient Greek, and could write them simultaneously, holding one pen in each hand. That story is probably apocryphal. Although Garfield was ambidextrous and did know both ancient languages, there’s no evidence that he ever really performed that feat. But it wasn’t a parlor trick that revealed his intelligence. He was just freakishly brilliant at everything he tried, and succeeded in an astounding number of unrelated fields, even though he was born into dire poverty and had no father that he could remember.

As far as Trump’s intelligence goes, I don’t know how they determined that he was the dumbest. I don’t know how to compare him to James Buchanan or Tippecanoe, for example, so he may not deserve last place, but he’s no genius. He was a C+ to B student at Fordham, and earned no honors at Wharton, where one of his teachers called him “the dumbest goddam student I ever had.” He never attended grad school, so there’s nothing to offset his mediocre undergrad record. As for high school, I think you can assume there is a good reason why he had Cohen write letters threatening legal action against any institution revealing his grades and SAT scores. Coincidentally enough, The Donald and I were both at Fordham in 1966, he in the spring, I in the fall of that year. Same university; same calendar year. I will be happy to share and compare our 1966 report cards, but you can bet with 100% certainly that he would never take up that challenge for any amount under any circumstances!