Trump Put Himself Above Lincoln, and 48% Said Failure

Trump placed himself above Abraham Lincoln. In a new YouGov poll, 48% of Americans rated him a failure as president.

That is a sharp gap between one man’s claim and the public’s view. I find the size of the gap striking. But a poll is not a final verdict on a presidency, and the word “failure” does not tell us why each person chose it.

Trump shared a ranking of U.S. presidents in August. He put himself alone in a tier called “The Greatest,” above Lincoln, George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he placed in the next tier, “Great.” The YouGov survey asked 2,175 U.S. adult citizens to rate presidents. It was conducted from Sept. 1 to 6, with an overall margin of error of about 3 percentage points.

The poll found that 20% called Trump great, and 10% called him near great. Another 8% said average, and 10% said below average. Four percent were unsure. The largest group, 48%, chose failure.

Those figures do not show what Americans think of every part of Trump’s record. They show how respondents placed him in a set of broad labels. Still, the contrast with his own ranking is hard to miss. Trump gave himself the highest place. The largest share of people surveyed gave him the lowest.

A wide gap in judgment

The same poll found a different kind of agreement around Lincoln. Fifty-seven percent called him great, the highest share for any president in the survey. Washington came next at 52%. John F. Kennedy ranked third, with 37% calling him great.

Trump had placed Lincoln and Washington below himself. On this point, the poll offers a plain answer to the question of whether Americans share his view. Most respondents did not call Trump great. And nearly half used the harshest label in the survey.

That does not mean all Americans agree. The poll’s categories show a range of views. Thirty percent rated Trump great or near great, while 18% put him in the average or below-average groups. The results capture a split in judgment, even as the largest group gave a clear negative answer.

Joe Biden and Richard Nixon also drew high shares of failure ratings. Biden received 35%, and Nixon 28%. Trump’s figure was higher than either. The survey does not tell us whether respondents weighed the same things when rating each man, or whether they compared presidents with one another at all.

I am wary of treating a label as a full account. “Failure” can mean a judgment about policy, conduct, results, or a person’s sense of what a president should be. The poll does not tell us which meaning people had in mind. It does show that Trump’s self-ranking is far from a shared public judgment.

That matters because a president’s legacy is not set by his own description of it. It forms over time, through public memory and debate about what changed, who benefited, and what costs followed. A poll taken now can tell us how people feel today. It cannot settle how history will judge him.

What the poll can tell us

There is another limit worth keeping in view. A poll records answers from a sample, not from every American. The margin of error is about 3 percentage points for the overall sample. That helps describe the range of uncertainty in the results, but it does not remove the deeper limits of a single survey: people may read the labels differently, and their views can change.

The striking point is not that every respondent rejected Trump’s claim. They did not. Thirty percent rated him great or near great. It is that his own top ranking has not carried over to the largest group in this poll. The gap is a fact about public opinion at this moment, not a measure of what all Americans believe or what they will believe later.

For ordinary people, these rankings may feel distant from the daily work of politics. The labels do not say whether a household feels safer, whether a job is secure, or whether government feels fair. Those judgments may shape how people rate a president, but the survey does not connect one answer to another.

That leaves a useful question in the open: what would have to happen for more Americans to see Trump as “The Greatest”? The poll cannot answer it. It can tell us that, for now, most respondents have not accepted that claim, and that nearly half chose “failure.” I am left less interested in the confidence of the ranking than in the distance between it and the people asked to judge.