It's My Mind: A Meme with a Source

Trump posted a ranking of the presidents. He put his own portrait in a box that did not exist in 1948.

That box is the whole argument. The rest of the chart is an old grid with a few new names dropped in.

Here's what the President posted on Truth Social on August 27, 2026.

The left will hate the self-portrait. That is easy to predict. The more useful objection came from the right.

Ben Shapiro: the list is crap even if you ignore the top box. Wilson was one of the worst. FDR stretched the Depression. Coolidge was strong and Harding was fine. Grant ran Reconstruction. Reagan is missing.

Here's what he said on X/Twitter:

This list is total crap. Put aside Trump at the top. Woodrow Wilson was one of the worst presidents in American history; FDR lengthened the Great Depression by eight years; Calvin Coolidge was awesome and Harding was fine; Grant oversaw reconstruction; and Ronald Reagan and… pic.twitter.com/KmSSwDpiJk
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 28, 2026

I like Shapiro. I also think he is grading a different test than the page Trump copied.

This is a meme built on a real ranking. November 1, 1948. Life magazine. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. asked 55 historians to sort the presidents they had into five buckets: Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average, Failures.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the last man on that list because he was the last finished presidency they could judge. Truman was sitting in the office, so his record was incomplete. William Henry Harrison and James A. Garfield were left off because they died almost immediately. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes had not happened yet.

That is why they are missing. Not because someone forgot Reagan.

What Trump added is small. A new top row for himself. Clinton in Average. Biden, Obama, and Carter in Failures next to Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding.

That last choice is the tell. Carter, Obama, and Biden are the Democrats he runs against in public. They belong in the ditch if the chart is a campaign poster.

Clinton does not. Trump spent years calling him a crook and a disgrace and still put him with James Madison and William McKinley instead of with Obama. The two men have been useful to each other since the 1990s — golf, fundraisers, the occasional kind word after a funeral. The ranking follows that pattern more than it follows party.

If this were only “Democrats fail,” Clinton would be in the bottom row. He is not. The habit is personal. The people Trump still fights go to Failures. The one he has made his peace with stays in the middle.

The next morning he posted a second graphic: five who built the country and five who broke it. Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Reagan, Trump on one side. Buchanan, Wilson, Carter, Obama, Biden on the other..

Source: @realDonaldTrump Truth Social

Reagan comes back. Wilson does not. Thursday he is Great. Friday he is bureaucracy.

That second post is the argument. The first post is the 1948 page with extra names.

Woodrow Wilson is the name that splits the room, and it should. My own problem with him is the racism. He resegregated the federal government. That is not a footnote.

1948 still put him with Lincoln and Washington. The historians were looking at the war and the peace he tried to design after it. The League of Nations was his idea. The war he presided over was sold as the war to end all wars. We still live in the architecture that followed, including the United Nations.

Both of those things can be true at once. He used the office. He also used it to write Jim Crow into the civil service.

Michael Knowles talked about the list on Friday and said it is not an ideological ranking. It is a list of men who knew how to wield power. Wilson could. FDR could. Lincoln could.

That is closer to what Schlesinger was measuring. Not who you would vote for now. Who bent the government when the country was at a turning point.

Lincoln sits with the Founders on almost every one of these charts because he held the Union together. The cost was federal power over the states that claimed a right to leave. People who care about that cost are not wrong to keep saying it. It is the same power question Knowles is asking.

I caught the origin of the meme on PBD’s Friday show. Once you see the 1948 page, the omissions stop looking random.