Good morning! And welcome to the latest installment of “Presidents on the Move.”

This week CSPAN released a new ranking of American presidents, a survey of all of our chief executives by 142 historians and professional observers. CSPAN updates this ranking periodically, and this year they expanded their list of pundits (versus the last time in 2017) to add greater “diversity in race, gender, age and philosophy.” Which, not surprisingly, has resulted in some interesting shifts in chief executive ratings…

At the top of the list, Lincoln and Washington and the usual suspects are all holding steady, but there are two new modern additions to the Top 10. Welcome to the bigs, Reagan(9) and Obama(10). I’m guessing that, in our current age of extreme political turbulence, the calm steadiness that was projected by the “Teflon Communicator” and “No Drama” has gained newfound respect.

In the second tier, Woodrow Wilson has dropped like a stone, from (6) down to the current (13). It seems folks have realized that, although he was an intellectual and a governor of New Jersey, he was an avowed racist. Similarly, Andrew Jackson has fallen from (13) to (22), perhaps as a result of his atrocious treatment of native Americans.

Meanwhile, Ulysses Grant is having a renaissance, rising from (33) to (20). Maybe that’s because his reputation for Gilded Age corruption has been thoroughly eclipsed by our last president’s quite obvious New Gilded Age fraud. Or perhaps it’s just that historian Ron Chernow wrote a nice book about him, so he’s enjoying a little of that uplifting “Hamilton Effect.”

Amongst some other modern presidents, Carter(26) and Ford(28) have slipped almost to the level of their criminal predecessor Nixon(31). Meanwhile, the Dubya has risen; BushJr(29) is now up near the neighborhood of BushSr(21). Someone explain that to me.

Reality bites hard on Rutherford B. Hayes. Elected due to a cynical political compromise in 1876, Hayes turned his back on Reconstruction and condemned African Americans to another century of suffering. He’s tumbled to (33). Similarly, Zach Taylor’s military victories in Mexico have lost their previous glow, and he’s fallen to (35).

And then we get down to the dregs. No one near the bottom of the list is showing any sign of redemption, whether they helped cause the Great Depression (Hoover (36)), failed to stop the Civil War, (Pierce (42) and Buchanan (44)), or betrayed Lincoln’s legacy (AJohnson(43)). These are the bad boys. The scalawags. An unrecoverable rogue’s gallery of rascals.

And in 2021, they are joined by a new member. Trump(41).