Fraser McGruer: Hello and welcome to the Cognitive
Engineering Podcast, brought to you by Aleph Insights and
produced by me, Fraser McGruer. On this podcast, we take a look
at a wide range of topics, and today, we'll be asking the
question, Is Donald Trump the worst president ever?
It's been a while since I've seen you. It's very nice to see
you again. Here we go, right? Nick, Donald Trump, worst
president ever, yeah.
Nick Hare: Well, as you know, we don't, we're not a political
podcast. We don't have an opinion about whether Donald
Trump is any good. But according to the famously unbiased source,
the guardian in 2024 mind you. So discussing his first term,
Donald Trump finished 45th and bottom of a list ranking US
presidents by greatness. And I think his list was compiled by a
bunch of, again, famously unbiased academics and people
like that. Yeah, probably from Harvard, yeah, that kind of
thing. So according to them, here's but let me tell you what
the Rolling Stone magazine said in 2006 George W Bush, the worst
president in history. Many historians are now wondering
whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst
president in all of American history. So, and I recall, I
still remember the 80s, when I recall my parents and their
right on friends talking about Ronald Reagan and how utterly
dreadful he was compared to the great presidents of the past and
so well, the question is, how do we make sure we're not just sort
of being biassed by recent events. And, you know, how can
we tell if, if our judgement that something it seems uniquely
bad, is actually correct, but, but just before we tackle that
sort of general question, just looking at presidential ratings,
which actually is something relatively objective, in the
sense that they're just measures of you know what is? What's the
average approval rating of every president during the course of
their term? Donald Trump is, in fact, lowest, well, at least of
all presidents since the 1950s and Kate, would you like to
guess who's top? It's quite an easy one. I think Obama. No no,
it's going to be Obama's mid, mid range, Roosevelt, Abraham
Lincoln, no, is since the fifth, oh, sorry, since the 50s. Oh,
Abraham Lincoln, then not those 50s. Since the 50s. I think this
is quite easy, if you think about probably it's somewhere
never got a chance, really. Yeah, Kennedy's at the top by a
long, long shout, and then it's Dwight Eisenhower, remarkably,
George H W Bush, I suspect, yeah, and so, but so according
to that right, according just looking at the ratings, average
ratings for their term, and sorry, was that Trump did come
lower. Sorry, did you say that's average approval ratings during
Yeah, so in other words, you said, average out their approval
throughout their term, and and just looking at that number,
Trump's at the bottom, and Kennedy is very much at the top,
bit of an outliner outlier. So, so there we are. So it is. Can
we therefore conclude that Donald Trump is indeed going to
go down in history as the worst president ever.
Fraser McGruer: Okay, so I mean, one of the things I think of,
first of all, is how useful are ratings in terms of an actual
judgement, because opinions change about people over time.
That's the first sort of thing that I think of. But anyway,
it's not me answering this, it's you guys. So where do we start
with this? Chris, what are your thoughts? What have
Chris Wragg: you got on this? Well, I think there's a specific
issue with with Donald Trump, and the perception of Donald
Trump, which is one of the reasons why Donald Trump is
viewed as a bad president. And that's really like if you look
at his phraseology, it's kind of at the level of a a playground
child. His eloquence is very low, and I think that's what a
lot of people would say they talk about the weave, and is
really him being pretty inarticulate and and not trying
to hide that fact. And I think so for a lot of people, I think
there's this sort of connection, maybe a dubious connection,
between eloquence and intelligence and ability to
lead, and I think Donald Trump is uniquely bad at that,
whereas, if you look at his antithesis, somebody like Obama,
exactly, Obama was highly eloquent and viewed by lots of
the intelligentsia as Being an excellent president. So I think
this, there's this conflation going on between ability to
articulate oneself and ability to preside.
Fraser McGruer: Yeah, I think there's an interesting thing
there about, you know, can intelligent, clever people be
wrong? Unthinkable.
Nick Hare: Yeah. And well, and also it does. How much does that
actually matter when you're being a president? Because the
thing is, I think what people miss, well, particularly kind
of, you know, anti, anti Trump, people miss, is that, yeah, he
isn't very eloquent, but he's very good at kind of reading the
room. I mean, there's something quite impressive about him, and
the way that he, he kind of manages a crowd. And, you know,
I'm not saying any of that is conscious. I mean, I suspect
it's just a sort of accident or something that he has learned to
do, but he's good at something when it comes to well, and if
you look at his what it isn't is, is spinning an excellent off
the cuff phrase. I mean, you can't really imagine him
delivering a speech
Chris Wragg: and about his sort of his debate performance in the
original set of primaries and then against Hillary Clinton,
when he was, you know, elected for his first term. There, there
are some very sort of famous asides that he, that he makes,
that are considered to be kind of quick, quick with but they
are. They are not. They're not high Brower sides, you know,
they're,
Nick Hare: they're and, I mean, that's all of a piece with him,
and his appeal in general, yeah, is what you'd expect. Yeah,
yeah. And I think, you know, there's something Republican
presidents are supposed to be hokey, you know, they're
supposed to be kind of common, the common man, I know, yeah,
that's sort of so you get your you know, Bush was the same,
Reagan was the same. You know, they're not meant to come out
with intellectual things that sound like you're a history
professor from Harvard. That's the job of Democrat presidents,
isn't it? So that's right, but, but anyway, I mean, look, I
think, I think the problem we really want to talk about is,
how do we know how much of that is our immediate investment in
the kind of low recent local political situation? So how much
of the reaction that people have to Trump and their judgement
that he's the worst president ever, how much of that is is
based on some on a kind of objective judgement of the kind
that you might be able to have about a 19th century president,
and how much of it is merely recency, you know, that's,
that's, that's really the question I think we want to look
at because, you know, this is, this crops up all the time,
right? You this common pattern of, I come along and say that
here is something that's kind of uniquely bad and terrible and
needs to be dealt with. And then, you know, the flip side of
that argument is, well, people have said that in the past. It's
what they said about George W Bush, what they said about
Reagan, you know, or I come along and say, Look, you know,
global warming is going to destroy the world. And you go,
Well, that's what they said about acid rain and global
cooling and the population. Why should we listen Yeah, why
should we listen to you? And so we have this, this common
pattern that you get of this is uniquely bad and terrible, and
we've got to do something about it versus but uniquely bad and
terrible things, according to people like you, happen all the
time. So one side is saying, you know, you're being alarmist, and
the other side is saying you're being complacent. And how do we
make sure? Because you know people are wrong. Intelligent
people are wrong. You know, you think of like the Yeah, Paul
Ehrlich's Population Bomb, 1968 well now you know. And now, of
course, everyone's being alarmist about population
collapse. So how do we, how do we know whether we should be
scared of something, or whether we should say, Yes, this is
actually uniquely terrible, versus how much are we going to
go, Well, you know what? In the morning, it'll look different.
So let's say that we, that a lot of people in the US think that
Donald Trump is this kind of, you know, once in a lifetime,
threat to democracy, to democratic institutions, and you
know, he's going to impose martial law on the US. He's
going to try and run for a third term. It's going to become his
personal dictatorship. It does seem to be trying. So that's
what a lot of people perceive, you know, and well, but
obviously, you know. And so the question is, Well, should we do
something about that? How much should should we believe that
that's true? And therefore, how much should we, you know,
resist? How much effort should we put into resisting that which
is not dissimilar from, you know, this question of, well,
what do we how much effort should we put into preventing
climate change, because, you know, yeah, well, this is all
doom and gloom, but at the same time, that's what they said
about, you know, the ozone layer, and that seems to have
fixed itself, admittedly, thanks to human intervention. But, you
know, you get the idea it's like, okay, well, how do I know
how alarmed to be when it's of kind of battle between the
alarmists and the complacentists in general. Is there a general
pattern of better thought that we should use to try and solve
that problem?
Chris Wragg: Yeah, and I think there's a, I think there's a
second sort of factor about judgement to do with judging
things in your own time, and that. It's not only that you you
get these, these emotional you know, when you're judging things
in your own time, you are affected by them, and so you
have an emotional response to them. So it's easier to be
objective about something that's 100 years ago than it is
something today, right? But I think also that the second
factor that means time is a factor when, when, sort of
considering whether something's good or bad, is that, over the
course of that time, what is good or bad changes according
to, you know, cultural standards. So, you know, you
take somebody like Washington, who you know, is still perceived
to be a great president, obviously, but you bring in
factors like slave ownership, or, you know, other sort of
positions that he took that are now totally unpalatable because
of the shift of what is considered to be, you know,
okay, by today's standards, what's what's good by today's
standards as a president, is partially subjective. There are
certain things where you can say, yes, okay,
Nick Hare: I feel like not owning slaves is probably a
right, probably something that some of the voters are going to
look for. Yeah, right, exactly,
Fraser McGruer: which also beggars the question how the
Confederacy won the war right? The end of civil war, let's say
yeah. And let's say there were, had they won? Yeah, right. Let's
say that. So you ended up with two Americas. Let's say in the
South. I'm guessing that Abraham Lincoln would probably be
thought of being a bad president, probably. I think he
is, in some ways, some but that's what ties into this
thing. I'm sort of labouring the point there, really. But you
know, the context changes.
Chris Wragg: Yeah, yeah. So, so I guess what I'm saying is, not,
not only do we have to aim off for the emotional aspect of the
near term versus the longer term in the past, there's also a
change in values that occurs, which then, you know, you assess
things differently.
Fraser McGruer: So that's helps us with this sort of ratings,
real time ratings, as it were, that sort of helps answer that
sort
Nick Hare: of question. But it also, I mean, it suggests that
it's not dissimilar to that question of like, would you, you
know, would you take a pill that changed your your preferences
and made you, you know, want to desert your family, and you run
off with a supermodel and you know. And then you actually, you
might just, you know, you might enjoy that if you took that
pill, you wouldn't, then care that you've done that, but you
now do care about that. And so like, let's say someone observes
that. Well, if we, if we leave Trump running, and he runs for
another two terms, you know, we will all start to accept that
America looks like Trump's America, and kids will grow up
and think it's normal, and people will stop caring about
they'll go, yeah, I remember when we had those annoying
democratic institutions that were slowing everything down
and, like, really getting in the way and gumming up our ability
to govern properly, you know. So you might observe that, well,
we, you know, we, we actually won't care in the future as much
as we think we care now. So perhaps that's that, you know,
that's an argument in favour of the complacency people is that,
well, you know, even though, actually, yes, us now care about
this, us in the future will just accept it well. And I suppose
you can make a similar argument. I think some economists have
made the same argument about about global warming. It's like,
well, we actually will just adapt to it. And, yeah, it'll be
a bit chaotic to begin with, but in 100 years time, you know,
it'll just be hotter, and we'll have, will have got
Peter Coghill: used to it, yeah, we're quite growing our grapes
in in Surrey, yeah.
Chris Wragg: But, I mean, there's a, there's a parallel,
I'm not a sort of Stark here, but, you know, famously terrible
Roman leader Julius Caesar, obviously changed the foundation
of of the Republic, you know, and subsequent to that, while
people complained about the sort of erosion of democratic
institutions, arguably, you know, Rome's power grew after
that. But nobody looks back. And really, you know, when you think
of Caesar, 90% of people don't think about what he did to Roman
institutions. Do they close out the territory
Peter Coghill: confident and the and this sort of the the getting
used to the normalisation of the new bad. Kind of assumes that
there is a continuum of bad, bad scale you can slide Exactly.
There might be things like global warming and other and
catastrophic, you know, not necessarily, but sort of
systemic changes in government and things can actually be a
sort of threshold beyond which change happens very much more
rapidly. So it might be. That when you're plumbing the depths
of the bottom, you sort of fall off a cliff, rather than just
keep finding new depths of it, yeah, so it
Nick Hare: might be that the barrel is five times deeper than
you thought.
Peter Coghill: Yeah. You suddenly fall off a shelf down
into a
Unknown: cloth, a cliff, yeah, under a barrel, yeah?
Peter Coghill: So, you know, so it might be that Trump's seeming
efforts to dissolve the institutions of democracy, if
he, if he succeeds, means that they can't, you can't, then
climb back out of that anymore. And global warming gets to a
point where the the the Gulf Stream shuts off, and we're
stuck in a localised Ice Age in the north in North Europe,
Northern Europe. So there's like, it's yeah, it's not.
Things aren't continuous, yeah, in complex systems,
Fraser McGruer: we are. So where are we with this? At the moment,
we've,
Nick Hare: well, we haven't mentioned the secretary problem,
which is not dissimilar to this kind of thing, where you're
trying to form some judgement or adopt some strategy of sort of
trying to work out you don't know how good or bad things can
get, and you're trying to work out how you know good or bad.
The current situation is, say, Yeah, and you haven't you know
that you've only got a limited sample. Well the so the
secretary problem, the idea is you've got to choose a secretary
for a number of candidates. You, let's say, you know, there's
going to be 100 candidates. You're going to see them all,
one off the other, and you can tell how good they are when they
walk in and and your job is to work out, or at least, maximise
your chances of choosing the best one. And it turns out, the
strat, the optimal strategy with this is to sample. Just treat
the first 30 as a sample against which you then, you then sort of
use that as a baseline, and you then pick the next person who
walks in, who's better than the best person from that sample.
And if that doesn't happen, well, you fluffed it. But the
thing is that that strategy turns out to be mathematically
optimal, so I think the analogy here is, well, actually, you
know, we should, you we should use the past, to some extent, as
a sample, and then make our judgments based on that sample.
Fraser McGruer: How, how do you measure, though, and how do you
know that what you're measuring is the right stuff?
Nick Hare: Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the problem. You can't
really apply it to the real world, where there's no sort of
finite, it's not like there's some finite number of samples,
but you should think in terms of, well, we've got a kind of,
there's a certain amount of information we're getting, you
know, and then there's, and then there's a, you know, a certain
amount of action that we perhaps want to apply. So, you know,
there's every, everything that happens, gives you. Gives is
valuable for for information purposes. Let's put it that way.
So on one hand, you might think, well, we don't know if Trump is
uniquely bad or whether it can get worse. Let's let it run for
a bit. Let's give him another five terms, and we'll see what
happens. And then we'll have some really good information
about how bad things can get, and then we'll know what to do
next time. But obviously, at the same time, you might think,
well, well, we don't really want to pay the potential cost of
doing that like it's not worth we think this actually might be
particularly terrible, and so we are going to try and put a stop
to it now. So I'm just, I'm just saying that, you know, it is,
there is a bit of both going on, and the amount of effort you
might think, well, the amount of effort we put into stopping it.
Put in stopping him, you know, actually maybe ought to be
proportional to how bad he really is. And we don't know
actually how bad he really is, because, you know, there could
be someone a lot worse down the line. And then we'll really want
to say, No, this one really is bad, you know, the the actual
Hitler turns up, you know, and, and then you think, Well, no, we
now, we, you know, now it really is this guy makes, you know,
compared to this guy, it makes Trump look like Bush compared to
Trump. Yeah, I mean, what I mean? It makes
Fraser McGruer: me think, sort of everyone's sitting there,
sort of wondering about Hitler, and going, No, this is this? Is
it actually, this is as bad as it gets. Maybe they were wrong.
Maybe there could be someone worse than Hitler. I don't know,
Chris Wragg: but I guess the advantage of having had someone
like Hitler, yeah, is that other countries have, like, your
sample, and you've got a baseline of what really, really
bad looks like.
Fraser McGruer: That does look so bad, yeah,
Nick Hare: yeah, something to avoid. Yeah, it's good. So he
did us a favour, really. I mean, he was the sort of the sort of
bad secretary, yeah. And now we well, but in a sense that's
true, right? I mean, in a sense it is true that is useful to
have this historical comparison. I mean, at the time we stopped
Hitler right at Munich, if we'd have actually deterred him from
doing it, there could well have been a worse Hitler, because we
wouldn't have had Hitler. We would have had all the same
technology as we've got, you know, today, but we wouldn't
have had a Hitler to kind of switch on our, you know, Hitler
detection algorithm.
Peter Coghill: Because, I think, you know, certainly anecdotally
sending out. At the time, there was disbelief in in France,
Germany, sorry, France, UK and America, about the activities,
the sort of the genocidal activities of Stalin and Hitler
that like, surely, nobody would actually ever do that, but only
when presented with hard evidence. So they go, my God,
these people are sorry.
Fraser McGruer: So we're saying Stalin was bad as well, right?
Stalin was, I thought they were on opposite sides, therefore he
wasn't great.
Nick Hare: I got to rethink this whole stuff. Yeah. So, so I
think, and I think that is true in general, in terms of actually
being able to get people to do things, a prediction isn't often
enough. So, I mean, you know that, as I said, like, I don't
think it's reasonable to have expected us to declare war on
Hitler after he invaded Czechoslovakia, for example,
like we wouldn't have had the support for it. It would have
looked like, you know, the UK was being the aggressive one.
You know, people were able to make excuses, and then it's
like, even after Poland, well, there's still kind of a sense
of, it's not really our business, you know, but you but
you can't. There's some point at which you can't act before it's
got worse, because people won't believe that it's not too bad,
just until it does exactly. Yeah, I wonder as well. It just
feels like a very perennial
Chris Wragg: problem, yeah, but there's so the question of
whether or not something can get worse, whether or not leaders
can get worse, and what the theoretical minimum quality
worst is, the absolute worst president is, and where, where
the current President sits on that, that scale is one thing.
So you know, you can say, right? Well, let's assume the best
president is here and the worst president is here,
theoretically. And you know Trump's about in the middle,
right of the of the full scale of presidential terribleness,
badiosity. Your badiosity? Exactly. That's interesting. But
you might decide there's some level at which you don't want to
go below anyway, regardless of how much further there is to go.
You know, it might be like you set, you know, a height, like
they used to have height limits for the police, for example, you
know, you've got to be over five foot 10 to be in the police. We
know there's people a lot shorter than that, but, you
know, that's where we're drawing our line for this, this quality.
You've got a rubber rugby tackle, a six foot four, right?
Robber, exactly. Yeah, you can't be three foot four. No, no. So,
so, yeah. So I So, I think that the point is is not, how much
worse could it get, but what is an acceptable standard to
perform this role?
Nick Hare: Yeah, and, and, I mean, I get, I suppose part of
the problem is that we form our view about what the distribution
of standards should be based on historical experience, right? So
we, we don't, we don't really come free with a kind of sense
of, Well, that's the absolute line in the sand. I mean, as you
said, you know the debate about slavery, which these days we
would consider to be very much you know, the line of where what
was acceptable in 1850 is absolutely miles away from the
discourse about what's acceptable now, right? But at
the time, you know, as far as they were concerned, actually,
there were kind of all these positions in between which kind
of involved actually owning slaves being okay, yeah. And so
how do we know? I mean, the idea, then, that you might get
to a situation where it was owning slaves was as
preposterous as we think it is, would have seemed ridiculous
then. So, you know, we we might think, well, we've got our
sliding scale of badness, and you know, Trump is skating at
just where that line is. But who knows, another 100 years, we
might look back and go, God, I wish we could get Trump back.
That guy was amazing, yeah, you know.
Peter Coghill: Or things might, things might generally improve,
such that we think drum is a lot worse than we currently think he
is. Yeah, a
Fraser McGruer: couple of things, yeah. We actually need
to sort of draw us to a conclusion reasonably soon. But
this sort of feels, I don't know if you're familiar with the
concept. This is something called the Aleph and and it sort
of this feels surprisingly familiar to other sort of things
that we've talked about, like, how do we know when change is
happening, for example, but I just wanted to sort of make that
observation, we do found, yeah, is quite profound. Thank you.
Now we do need to sort of move towards a conclusion. What do we
got? What do you want to finish off?
Nick Hare: I've got a well, I've got a number. Okay, so is Trump?
Is Trump? Like, well, just we've only got average approval
ratings for his first term. And as I said, of all the
presidential terms since the 50s, that he is the lowest 41.1
Fraser McGruer: right, just to check. So when we say average,
is it taking average over that term, but across all sorts of
different kind of points? Calling sources and,
Nick Hare: okay, sorry, no, it's Gallup. So Assistant survey that
they would, I, I would guess that, you know, every month or
something, throughout the throughout the you know that the
term they are then just taking the average, because, of course,
it always starts out high and falls Yeah. So, you know, there
are other measures you could look at, like approval after a
certain amount of time or whatever. But this is quite
it'll do, is what I'm saying. And if you is kind of, they're
roughly, they're not, but not far off a kind of normal
distribution. And if you take, if you assume it's a normal
distribution, and that each time we draw a presidential approval
rating from this distribution, Trump is sort of roughly at the
10% point right? So 41.1 as an approval rating is, is, sort of
cuts, is above about 10% of presidents. You could, you could
have, if so, if that's true, it means that he's one in a 40 year
level of badness. Okay, yeah. So basically, you know, in other
words, every 10 presidents, you get one as bad or worse than
Trump, purely, and by bad or worse I mean purely in terms of
average approval, right? And in fact, lo and behold, if you look
at the his approval at the beginning of this term, 2025 it
was actually higher than his approval at the beginning of
2016
Chris Wragg: Ryan, believe that. And I think this is a sort of
key factor in in that that form of measurement of average
approval rating over the term, if you take somebody like Joe
Biden, actually the second lowest, right, okay, so, but I
would imagine that at the point at which it was apparent that
he, you know, he had sort of advanced dementia, or whatever,
that his, his, you know that that sort of six or 12 month
period towards the end of his presidency, I can only imagine
his approval ratings were, were very low at that point and and
that he was deemed, you know, if you're a terrible president for
let's say you start A nuclear war, or you're or like Nixon,
yeah, you know, you eat one lousy foot. They call you a
cannibal, right? Exactly at that point. You may have been
perfectly mediocre throughout the rest of your presidency, but
if you do one really terrible thing, right, in the last you
know, the dog days of your your incumbency, you could be the
worst, the worst president, yeah.
Nick Hare: I mean, I think if you if, if you imagine having a
president who actually has dementia for one quarter of his
term, I think you might say, well, you know, that's not
great, yeah. That's not what we kind of ideally would have,
yeah. So, you know, I think it seems for that period, they were
the worst president, well, ever been? Yeah, yeah.
Fraser McGruer: Possibly, I got a question finish off, but just
before we do, it makes me wonder, like, if you were living
in an autocracy that you know I you would still be having these
same debates. Let's say if you were allowed to right, which you
wouldn't. But let's say you're in the People's Republic of
China. Wouldn't publish them. Yeah, you wouldn't publish them.
You wouldn't talk to them about it. You huddle quietly in a cup
and talk about it, but you'd still be talking about leaders
that are better or worse than others. Yeah, I don't know.
Chris Wragg: It's because, and of course, approval rating in
that context is less important. It's not like approval doesn't
count in autocracies, because, you know, revolutions topple
them, yeah, you get killed exactly, but, but it is less
immediate. And, you know, actually approval is, is, is
quite a fickle thing, right? And so that's why, perhaps the
retrospective judgement about presidents is different, because
you actually can then look at things like what their record
was, what did they achieve? You know, large infrastructure
projects that might be massively unpopular at the time suddenly
turned out to have been a really good idea. I mean,
Fraser McGruer: it makes me think that I wonder if it will
always be the case that people be looking at stuff and
wondering, Is that good or bad?
Unknown: Well, there's something to that's, you know, to chew on.
I'll let
Fraser McGruer: you, you know, let that one sit with you. I've
got a question. I want to keep it on you, as presidents,
actually, and I was wondering if there are some precedents which
are kind of more or less universally viewed as being bad,
not good. But are there any of those presidents that you've got
kind of a sneaking regard for? You think, actually, there was
bits and pieces they did. I rather like about them. So
Peter, go for
Peter Coghill: it, yeah. So Richard Nixon wasn't very well
liked. Did some bad things. Wasn't pretty popular, but was,
yeah, it was that. Middle of the table, turns out, in middle of
the table. But yeah, he Yeah. Famously, was impeached for
trying to rig the election, which is a bit of a no, a bit of
a no go area in the United States. Well, he resigned in the
end there, he did, yeah, yeah, but did some pretty decent
things. So he ended the Vietnam war,
Unknown: peace with honour. Yeah, Vietnam. He, he
Peter Coghill: opened relations with China. Debatable.
Fraser McGruer: China thing is very Yeah, go, yeah, quite
Peter Coghill: a big deal. So paved the way for globalisation
in the last part of the 20th century, which has uplifted the
standards of life for many, many around the world, environmental
protection, civil rights, Native American self determination and
lowering the voting age plus space exploration, the
continuing the Apollo missions throughout his tenure. Yeah.
Okay, so some big things
Unknown: good old Nixon.
Chris Wragg: I also, what I also really like about Nixon is that
he had a chip on his shoulder, and that he railed against the
sort of liberal intellectualism, and he hated that sort of clique
of ivy league, sort of Kennedy type, right? Exactly. So
personality wise, I'm much more on his side as a bit of an
outsider, not a not a terribly naturally popular man. I
thought, yeah,
Fraser McGruer: yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's some
good points there.
Nick Hare: Chris Nick, well, I I'd like to put in a word for
LBJ, you still mind go, yeah. Keep going, yeah. Well, he
mainly because he was obsessed with his balls. I'm not
interested in the he was always going on. It was apparently used
to ring up his tailor and moan about the fact that his
testicles weren't sitting comfortably, and like, where,
where his knob should be, and stuff. But he used to get,
apparently used to get his genitals out, to to sort of
deliberately intimidate people and things. I mean, I just feel
like that's not I feel like, if
Chris Wragg: Donald's not used enough, I feel like,
Nick Hare: if Donald Trump did that in a way, nobody would be,
nobody would be. I actually think it would raise an eyebrow,
even if Donald, like Donald Trump, has done incredibly
outrageous things, I still think he got his, he got his genitals
out. It would make the news.
Fraser McGruer: I think you're probably right. Yes, I wonder if
it made the news at the time
Unknown: with LBJ, though I doubt it was no biography, yeah,
yeah, yeah.
Fraser McGruer: We've done everyone. We have done Chris.
Oh, sorry. Chris,
Chris Wragg: yeah, well, Nixon would have been my shout. But I
also have a, have a strong, sort of soft spot for George W Bush.
I think he was just an extreme, like in terms of presidents that
actually do what they think needs to be, needs to be done.
You know, act on the basis of integrity. I felt he did.
Whether he got things right or not is another matter, but I
felt like he's one of the few presidents you can look back on
that didn't feel like a bit of a shyster. And he also did a lot
in terms of tackling HIV and AIDS in, you know, across Sub
Saharan Africa. So, I think, and he came up with the that
immortal line, didn't he about the problem with the French, as
they have no word for entrepreneur, which I think is,
is just such a brilliant quote.
So,
Fraser McGruer: so George W Bush, yeah, no. Good shout. Good
shout, yeah, I shan't bother because LBJ was mine for the
same reasons. Yeah. All right, lovely. Let's stop there. You've
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