By Christopher Young,
Contributing Writer,
There have been forty-five men holding the office of the president, for a total of forty-seven presidencies. The only two to hold two non-consecutive terms are Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump. Twenty-three have been one-term president’s owing to not being reelected for a second term or dying in office; four by assassination. While many presidents have been deemed successful and many not, there are six of these men, all white, that truly stand out because they threatened our own citizens. In 2022, U.S. News & World Report published a survey of the ten worst presidents, and three of these six were on the list: Buchanon at #1 (worst of the ten worst), Andrew Johnson at #2, and Donald Trump at #3. Men elected to govern for all yet did the opposite.
John Adams was our 2nd president and under his administration dozens of Americans including newspaper publishers and editors were arrested, fined, or jailed for speaking in opposition to him and his policies – all under the Sedition Act of 1798 – in direct contradiction and violation of the First Amendment which had been ratified less than ten years earlier. James Buchanon was our 15th president and is said to have colluded with the Supreme Court to deny personhood to African Americans leading up to the Civil War. Andrew Johnson was our 17th president and he “urged violence against his political opponents as he sought to guarantee a white supremacist republic after the Civil War,” per Polisci.brown.edu.
Woodrow Wilson was our 28th president and in some ways seems the most complex of the six who threatened fellow Americans. Some historians call him a visionary – he created the Federal Reserve and League of Nations and other reforms considered progressive. Yet Wilson segregated federal offices and he modernized, popularized, and nationalized Jim Crow laws. Authoritarian actions that revealed his moral failings on race.
Richard Nixon was our 37th president. Some claim that intellectually, he was among our greatest presidents. He established the Environmental Protection Agency and Title IX – prohibiting sex-based discrimination in any school or education program that receives federal funding. He expanded Social Security and ended the Viet Nam War and the draft. Then there was Watergate – directing the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters combined with a cover-up using government resources, and a slush-fund provided by wealthy individuals and corporations, all leading to his resignation. Further, Nixon created the War on Drugs targeting African American communities, fostering fear and mass incarceration. He had a well-known enemy list to harass political opponents, and he provoked global tension by threatening nuclear escalation – referred to as the Madman Theory.
The 45th and 47th president is Trump – the latest Threatener-in-Chief. He implemented travel bans from non-white countries and super-charged hostile anti-immigration efforts. He stokes fear and chaos at every intersection of fairness and decency, surely knowing the negative impacts on our hard-fought democracy. He signed executive orders to remove diversity, equity, and inclusion entirely from the federal government. He’s had countless Emoluments Act violations – enriching himself on the taxpayer dime. He threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota – a form of government power reserved for dire emergencies emanating from the principle that the American military should not police the American people on domestic soil. He creates emergencies where none exist and then claims to Make America Great Again by exerting force and brutality to supposedly solve the issue he created – akin to an arsonist-firefighter.
Trump’s politics of grievance and retribution appear boundless. At the end of last year when six Democratic lawmakers released a video reminding active duty servicemembers of their duty to not follow unlawful orders, Trump called for their hanging. All six are military veterans or intelligence officers who wore the cloth of this country and understand the oath of office, unlike him. He said all the members of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack – a bipartisan committee – should be jailed for their roles in investigating him.
Trump has been threatening higher education his entire first year back in office, and his minions were at it before that. Not only attacking university presidents for their stance on DEI, but withholding federal research funding at Harvard, Columbia, Northwestern, Cornell and Brown. The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, wrote in April 2025, “Trump is weaponizing antisemitism investigations to attack disfavored speech and stoke culture wars, distrust and division, and to undermine higher education as a bulwark of democracy and an engine of our economy. It’s wrong, antidemocratic and unconstitutional.”
By threatening the takeover of Greenland, he sent tremors through the thirty-two member countries of NATO. Greenlanders are Danish citizens. They fought alongside U.S. troops in Operation Iraqi Freedom and were there during Operation Resolute Support in Afghanistan. When will his deranged threats be interpreted by U.S. allies as threats by America itself? When will a clear majority of American’s decide they don’t want a Threatener-in-Chief?
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