Every year on and around Presidents Day, public opinion polls are taken to judge who the American people most admire among past Presidents.
For the past decade, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have switched with each other as the best President of the past half century.
This year, the University of Virginia Center For Politics, operated by Professor Larry Sabato, and Ipsos, an international, independent marketing research firm have come to the conclusion that the rating of JFK is the highest, with Ronald Reagan close behind, but Barack Obama a competitive third place, followed by Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and his son George W. Bush tied for fifth place.
Dwight D. Eisenhower is seventh, followed by Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and then Donald Trump in 10th place, just a bit ahead of Lyndon B. Johnson, and then Richard Nixon in last place.
This polls shows that Obama has remained popular a year after leaving the Presidency, and a sign he will likely remain high in public opinion, quite an accomplishment considering the bitterly divided America we have at the present time.
But it shows ignorance, to have the two Bushes in a tie, and probably mostly because the younger Bush is a recent President, and many are confused by the similar names.
To put Eisenhower seventh is more a lack of knowledge of a President from the 1950s, and to put Trump, a disastrous President low on the list, but ahead of LBJ and his Great Society and Nixon and his diplomacy, is a true sign of pure lack of historical knowledge by the American public. It is true that Johnson engaged America in the disastrous Vietnam War and Nixon was forced out of office due to the Watergate Scandal. But their accomplishments were enough to put them above Trump in a realistic situation where people know historical facts.
So clearly, there is a dire need for major emphasis on the study of history and of the Presidency, as this lack of knowledge brought us Donald Trump to the White House, with zero qualifications for the White House!