On Thursday, Donald Trump posted a six-tier ranking of U.S. presidents on Truth Social and placed himself alone at the top. Lincoln and Washington sat one level below. Historians have long put those two at the summit. Republican voters, in recent polls, now put Trump first inside their own party. The gap between those two verdicts is the story.
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Key Takeaways by Planet Today
The claim: Trump shared a graphic labeling himself “The Greatest,” with Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson grouped as “Great.”
The source of the chart: The layout closely follows a 1948 LIFE magazine ranking compiled from 55 historians by Arthur Schlesinger Sr. Trump’s version keeps most of the old tiers, adds himself at the top, and drops recent Democrats into “Failures.”
What Republican voters say: A CNN/SSRS comparison highlighted by analyst Harry Enten found 53 percent of Republicans named Trump the Republican president they admire most, ahead of Reagan at 18 percent and Lincoln at 8 percent.
What scholars say: The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project survey of 154 presidency scholars put Lincoln first (about 95 out of 100) and Trump last (10.92). He also finished last in the project’s 2018 survey.
The wider public: A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted August 21–24 put Trump’s job approval at 33 percent, with 65 percent disapproving — among the lowest readings of either of his terms.
What Trump Posted
The graphic divides 34 presidents into six boxes: The Greatest, Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average, and Failures. Trump occupies the first box by himself. The second box holds Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, John Adams and James K. Polk sit in “Near Great.” Bill Clinton appears among the “Average.” Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding are listed as “Failures.”
Eleven presidents do not appear at all. The missing names include Ronald Reagan, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and both George Bushes, plus William Henry Harrison and James A. Garfield, who died shortly after taking office. Historians noting the omissions pointed out that Reagan, still the default hero of late-20th-century Republican memory, is absent from a chart posted by the current Republican president.
Trump attached a CNN clip in which Enten described the GOP admiration numbers as a “historic comparison,” saying Trump “nearly triples up” on Reagan. The post went up on Truth Social on Thursday, August 27, 2026, and was widely recirculated the next day.
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Where the Graphic Came From
The 1948 LIFE survey asked historians to sort presidents into great, near great, average, below average, or failure. Schlesinger’s exercise became a template that later academic polls refined rather than discarded. Trump’s image preserves much of that mid-century skeleton. What it changes is the ceiling and the floor: a new top tier created for one living president, and a bottom tier expanded to include Obama, Biden and Carter.
That is not a small edit. The original survey was an expert exercise. The revised chart is a political statement. It borrows the authority of an old academic format while reversing the judgment those formats have consistently produced about Trump himself.
What Mainstream Outlets Emphasized
U.S. and British outlets treated the post as self-portraiture more than scholarship. Mediaite, HuffPost, The Independent and Newsweek all noted the same two facts: Trump put himself above Lincoln and Washington, and the chart looks like a doctored 1948 ranking. Several stories lingered on the missing Republicans — especially Reagan — as the more revealing detail.
The same coverage paired the graphic with two other data points. First, the partisan admiration poll Enten aired on CNN. Second, the collapse in Trump’s overall job numbers. Reuters/Ipsos, in a survey that closed August 24, found 33 percent approval and 65 percent disapproval. Earlier August readings from the same series had already tied the low of his first term. CNN’s own July survey put approval at 34 percent and disapproval at 66 percent. Economic and inflation scores in those surveys were weaker still.
Mainstream framing, in other words, ran on a split screen: unmatched strength inside the Republican coalition, and record weakness among the full electorate.
What Other Outlets and Voices Stressed
RT, which first circulated a compact version of this story to many international readers, presented the post as a direct ranking exercise and quoted the CNN clip at length. It also flagged the historian surveys that place Trump at the bottom and the Reuters/Ipsos approval slump. The factual skeleton of that report matches what U.S. outlets independently confirmed.
Conservative commentary treated the chart less as a historical claim than as a loyalty test. The Daily Caller led with the punch line that readers would “never guess” who sat at the top. Trump-aligned accounts on X treated the GOP poll as the only ranking that matters heading into the midterms: if Republican voters have replaced Reagan with Trump as the party’s defining president, the self-ranking is, in that view, simply catching up to the coalition.
Critics on the other side called the chart a rewrite of party memory. Leaving Reagan off a Republican ranking, they argued, is not an accident of an old template. It is a statement that the party’s center of gravity has moved from the Cold War conservative canon to a single living figure. Supporters reply that admiration polls among actual Republican voters now say the same thing, and that academic surveys are produced by a professoriate that has never rated Trump highly.
The Two Scoreboards
Presidential “greatness” has never been a single measurement. It is at least three different questions asked of three different audiences.
The first audience is historians and political scientists. The Presidential Greatness Project asked 154 scholars in late 2023 to score every president from 0 to 100. Lincoln averaged 95.03. Franklin Roosevelt and Washington followed in the low 90s. Trump averaged 10.92 and finished last, behind James Buchanan. In 2018 the same project had already placed him last, with 12.34. Those surveys include conservative and Republican respondents, but the pool is still an academic one. Conservative critics have long argued that this tilts the results.
The second audience is Republican voters. The CNN/SSRS comparison Enten highlighted is not a greatness ranking of all 45 men who have held the office. It is a question about which Republican president current Republicans admire most. On that narrower question, Trump is not close to the pack. Fifty-three percent named him. Reagan received 18 percent. Lincoln received 8 percent. An Elon University poll cited in the same cycle found 29 percent of Republicans calling Trump the best president in U.S. history, just ahead of Lincoln at 25 percent among that partisan subsample. Among all adults in the Elon survey, Lincoln led and Trump was further back.
The third audience is the country as a whole, asked a simpler question: do you approve of the job the incumbent is doing right now? That is not a verdict on Lincoln or Washington. It is a verdict on the present. Reuters/Ipsos in late August put approval at 33 percent. Other late-summer surveys clustered in the low-to-mid 30s. Those numbers sit far below the partisan admiration figures and far below the self-ranking on Truth Social.
None of the three scoreboards cancels the others. They measure different things. Confusing them is how a cable-news clip becomes a claim to stand above the founder of the republic.
Why the Omissions Matter
A ranking that excludes Reagan, Eisenhower, Kennedy and both Bushes is incomplete as history even if it is complete as messaging. Reagan remains the most common reference point for Republican presidents who want to talk about tax cuts, the Cold War and optimism. Eisenhower still ranks near the top of most scholarly lists. Kennedy remains one of the most popular presidents in public memory. Their absence is the surest sign that the chart is not trying to be a full ledger.
The same is true of the “Failures” box. Grant’s presidency was stained by corruption scandals; modern historians have raised his standing because of his record on Reconstruction and civil rights. Harding’s short term is still associated with the Teapot Dome affair. Grouping living Democratic presidents with those two names is a rhetorical move, not a consensus finding. Obama finished seventh in the 2024 scholarly survey. Biden debuted in the mid-teens. Those placements are themselves debated, but they are not “failure” scores in the sense the 1948 categories used.
The Political Timing
The post landed in the last stretch before the 2026 midterms, with Republicans defending slim majorities and the president’s national numbers at or near the floor of his two terms. Enten’s CNN segment was as much about intra-party dominance as about history. Trump’s endorsement record in Republican Senate primaries this cycle has been near-perfect. That is the power the 53 percent figure describes: not a historian’s ranking, but control of a party’s imagination.
Whether that intra-party grip can offset a 33 percent national approval rating is a separate question, and it is the one November will answer. The Truth Social chart does not change the electoral math. It does show how the president wants the comparison framed: not Trump versus the living opposition, but Trump versus the American pantheon.
How to Read the Claim Without Choosing a Side
A president ranking himself first is not new in tone. It is unusual in format. Most self-assessments stay in speeches. This one borrowed the look of a mid-century expert survey, altered the top and the bottom, omitted the Republican presidents who complicate the story, and hit send next to a poll that measures admiration inside one party.
Readers who trust voter sentiment inside the GOP will see confirmation. Readers who trust scholarly surveys will see contradiction. Readers who watch approval polling will see a third, bleaker number. All three datasets are real. They do not describe the same thing. The honest way to hold them is side by side, not stacked into a single trophy.
Related Reading on Planet Today
Original article: Trump Ranks Himself Above Lincoln and Washington on Planet Today 🚀
Automatically republished from the main blog.