It’s said that when God created the earth, one third of the angels disapproved and went rogue. Sixty-seven percent is a solid D or a failing grade in school, but in presidential polls, it counts as a solid win — certainly better than President Trump right now, who ranks far lower than God did at creation but is nearly as good in his own opinion.
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The highest approval rating any president ever got was 90 percent for George W. Bush in 2001, but we feel this is unfair, since he hadn’t done anything, was about to botch everything, and technically he cheated. He had all the hard work done for him by Osama bin Laden. To prove this, right after Dubya we rank his dad, who got 89 percent for kicking ass instead of getting his ass kicked. But Dad raised taxes, so we fired him.
Then there’s FDR in 1945, riding high at 84 percent right before Harry Truman got 87 percent for nuking Japan — another so-so president saved by a war crime. And JFK comes in at 72 in 1961 for doing God knows what. Here’s proof that in America, cuteness will get you practically anywhere. We know he certainly ranked higher with every lady except his wife.
Lyndon B. Johnson comes in at 78 percent in 1963, mainly for wrecking every bulwark of greatness in the whole country, from immigration to welfare to whether you can fire losers. God created the Milky Way, and He gets only 67 percent; LBJ ruined it, and he got 78.
(As an honorable mention, Bill Clinton gave China “special trade relations,” taking an angry, broken, treacherous, and communist nation from rock-bottom to superpower, and making sure American jobs went overseas to slave labor. And how is he rated? Very well it turns out, ending with 65 percent — the highest exit poll for any postwar president. Mostly because the economy “did well” while falling apart.)
And what about last place? Not willing to be outdone in anything, the worst rating is also George W. Bush at 19 percent in 2008 — mostly because he had done things by then. What goes up must come down, they say.
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Second, we have Harry Truman at 22 percent in 1952, first because of the economy, and next because we had to fight the communists he’d spent the whole last war saving.
Third, we have Richard Nixon at 24 percent in 1974 because of the Watergate scandal — due to the fact that Americans, at the time, had no idea how bad the scandals would be by 2015. And why would we behave so badly? Mostly because we were demoralized and replaced due to policies set by Lyndon B. Johnson.
So far, President Trump is doing horribly in the polls — mainly for trying to undo the worst things all the presidents did before him. This means manning the border, sending back third-world illegals, bringing jobs back from China, putting an end to riots and lawlessness, ending DIE as far as possible, prosecuting welfare fraudsters, letting people speak truth on Twitter, cleaning up the FBI and the military, trying to make voting fair again, taking on Big Food and Big Pharma, and pummeling Cuba and Iran and Venezuela. For attempting these things, he gets a measly 33 percent, mostly because of inflation. Combined with Bush 1’s tax hikes and Clinton’s boomtown, this proves that American priorities aren’t always in the right place. But they’re certainly always in the same place.
All things considered, this puts God’s rating pretty high — especially since He was getting rated by angels, whose standards are (in this writer’s opinion) a bit rigid. He would probably have done better if He’d lowered the price of gas, or given them a tax break. But we can thank God that at least He wasn’t ranked by Americans, who would have polled Him at 85 for flooding the world, 23 for nuking Sodom and Gomorrah, and a 55 score on Rotten Tomatoes for the four Gospels, women, and the synapses we used to rank Him.
Jeremy Egerer is the author of The Prejudices — a collection of questionable essays on Substack.
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Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.