[The Soup Nazi]

Back to the shittiness, sadly. From Zakaria's newsletter:

Worst US President Ever: Andrew Johnson?

During Tuesday’s widely bemoaned US presidential debate, a Joe Biden zinger caught some attention: his assertion to President Trump that “you are the worst president America has ever had.” Coincidentally, US political historian Eric Foner last week published an essay in the London Review of Books suggesting the distinction should go to a different president: Andrew Johnson.

Reviewing Brenda Wineapple’s “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation,” Foner writes of Johnson’s abject racism—“[i]t is difficult to think of a president who voiced his prejudices in starker language”—and his undermining of Reconstruction. With the South under temporary military control, Johnson “used this power to relieve of command any military officials who worked too diligently to register black voters” and was impeached by pro-Reconstruction lawmakers seeking to block Johnson from replacing his secretary of war.

The week before Biden’s quip, Foner nonetheless drew comparisons. “[i]n some ways Trump is a lineal descendant of Andrew Johnson,” Foner wrote. “Johnson repeatedly referred to his approach to Reconstruction as ‘My Policy’, as if no one else was involved in its inception or implementation. Trump insists ‘I alone’ can solve the nation’s problems.” Some of Johnson’s speeches “contained ‘a startling chain of venomous epithets’ for his enemies … Most important, Johnson was a pioneer of the white nationalist politics today exemplified by Trump.”