We like to think that Donald Trump will end up being recognized as the worst President of the United States (So Bad!), that sometimes we forget some of the truly mediocre—or worse!—men who have occupied the Oval Office. And two men generally conceded to be amongst the worst we’ve had died today. We lived through them, we can (probably) live through Il Douché.
Let’s start with Millard Fillmore (1874), who would go onto the bottom any Presidential ranking, if only for being the inspiration for “Mallard Fillmore,” which is basically Fox News reduced to a three-panel comic strip starring a duck. (Guess someone forgot Orwell’s “duckspeak,” a Newspeak word from “Nineteen-Eighty-Four” meaning to voice the party’s beliefs without thinking, which pretty much describes “Mallard.”) He assumed office after the death of Zachary Taylor, and is probably best known for enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. He was the last president to be elected as a Whig, and the only president who ran as a leader of the American Party, better remembered as the “Know Nothing” Party. It’s quite possible that our current president might do the same for the GOP (who rose out of the Whig Party’s ashes), and while he cannot join the “Know Nothings” (although he shares many of their nativist principles), he could be our first president who literally does know nothing.
(Not only are Il Douché & Fillmore bad presidents, both could be played by Alec Baldwin)
(If he’s so awful, you might ask, why do so many California cities have streets or neighborhoods named “Fillmore”? It’s an accident of death. Taylor laid the groundwork for statehood, but died two months before it was official; Fillmore was President when the Golden State got its star on the flag.)
Next up: William Howard Taft (1930). Teddy Roosevelt’s chosen successor for the presidency, he proved to be a disappointment. His worst apostasy? Signing the protectionist Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act, which raised the tariffs on iron ore and coal imports (sound familiar?) This so angered the Progressive wing of the Republican Party that Roosevelt ran against him as the candidate of the Progressive Party (better known as the “Bull Moose” party) in the 1912 election, all but assuring the election of Woodrow Wilson. Taft, who claimed to be more comfortable teaching law at Yale University, was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1921 by Warren G. Harding, who is also one of our lesser presidents.
Others who died on March 9 include, William Poole (1855), better known as Bill The Butcher, leader of the non-comic Bowery Boys, and portrayed by Daniel Day Lewis in Martin Scorcese’s “Gangs of New York”; and Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1917), inventor of the aircraft that bears his name, without whom we might all be listening to Led Dirigible, which just doesn’t have that same…zing.
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