Until Trump, I could argue that the decline in presidential timber was pretty obvious. There was Nixon, whom I loathed, as the media told me to, in the 1970s. But then came Ford, and he didn’t seem so bad, at least if you forget about the idiotic WIN campaign.

I would’ve voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, if I had been allowed to vote. But Carter quickly betrayed his most interesting campaign promise, and botched the rollout of deregulation in America. So he was worse than Ford, as I judged before 1980.

Ah, Reagan. I was no fan. I did not love or hate him, but it wasn’t he who whipped inflation — that was Paul Volcker, and by 1980 I understood monetary policy somewhat — and it was he who signed the appropriation bills to raise expenditures and the debt. He also “fixed” Social Security in the manner prescribed by Ponzi schemers. I judged him worse than Carter long before he exited office. And before I helped publish Murray Rothbard’s “Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy.”

I always hated ex-CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush. He presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union and then proceeded to make sure that there would be no “peace dividend.” He set America on its course of pointless wars forever. How I hated GHWB!

Bill Clinton was a horror show, though. I never liked him or his wife. I cut my teeth writing about politics on mocking him. I could never forgive him for the massacre near Waco, Texas. Evil man with an evil wife. “Worst president ever” . . . until 2000, when the choice was between the risible Al Gore, the Know-Nothing-At-All, and George Walker Bush, who didn’t pretend to know anything. Bush got in, “9/11” happened, and then came the wars, the torture, the surveillance, the security theater, making Clinton look good. The decline was a pattern.

But time doesn’t stand still. In 2008, the Republicans needed to be punished for their insane lie-based wars. And Obama sure seemed better. Though I promoted him to my Democrat friends over the execrable Hillary Clinton, and Democrats rightly leaped away from Her Horrificness, electing him as president was a really bad move. He was obviously being blackmailed by the Deep State, for he quickly toed the line to continue bombing campaigns and detention systems and spying on citizens, but it got worse: he turned his back on racial reconciliation, which had been well under way, and fanned the flames of racial antagonism and the culture war. More subtly, the admiration for him as a “cool guy” was so cringe that it ruined the left, morally. Leftist culture never recovered. Obama’s second term made it clear that he was indeed a worse president than GWB.

But then we got Trump, in one of the big surprises of our time. Though beleaguered from the start, his first three years were so good that I thought he broke the pattern of perpetual decline. Best Prez Since Ford? I marveled. But 2020 happened, and he reacted badly — in the worst possible way, actually — and then lost control of everything, allowing the return of the Democrats.

Which leads us to Joe Biden, who — morally, intellectually, and as a proponent of policies — is the worst president in American history. He is a doddering old corrupt pedo. And not in control. What a low point!

My fear is that the only person who could be worse than Joe Biden would be Donald Trump Redivivus: he will be so beset on all sides, somehow he’ll go the wrong way and top the awfulness of 2020. It may not be “his fault,” but he could still become the worst president.

twv