Who was the shadiest US president?

FDR or Truman. Close call

Truman is the arch war criminal, nuking Japan twice, a genocidal psychotic monster.

FDR intentionally set up Japan, provoked them into attacking Pearl Harbor and failed to tell Short & Kimmel, when he knew the bombing was about to begin. Read Day of Deceit which proves it. FDR intentionally allowed thousands of Americans to die at Pearl Harbor so he could get us into WW2 and have more Americans die.

Hard to tell which is worse, FDR and Truman, both genocidal, psychopaths. Shadiest? Well, they hid their genocidal plans and pretended to be courageous and humanitarians. That’s shady, over the top.

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If Truman wasn’t around Iran would still be a democracy and not a Muslim state.

and Hiroshima…

Not saying Hiroshma didnt end a war.. but USA caused the middle east problems when they ousted the elected leader.. Their elected prime minister was going to audit and root out corruption on the oil companies.. USA couldnt have that.. nope.

1953 Iranian coup d’état – Wikipedia
Overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran The 1953 Iranian coup d’état , known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup d’état ( Persian : کودتای ۲۸ مرداد ‎), was the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of the Shah , Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on 19 August 1953. [5] It was orchestrated by the United States (under the name TPAJAX Project [6] or ” Operation Ajax “) and the United Kingdom (under the name ” Operation Boot “). [7] [8] [9] [10] The clergy also played a considerable role. [11] Mosaddegh had sought to audit the documents of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), a British corporation (now part of BP ) and to limit the company’s control over Iranian oil reserves . [12] Upon the AIOC’s refusal to co-operate with the Iranian government, the parliament ( Majlis ) voted to nationalize Iran’s oil industry and to expel foreign corporate representatives from the country. [13] [14] [15] After this vote, Britain instigated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil to pressure Iran economically. [16] Initially, Britain mobilized its military to seize control of the British-built Abadan oil refinery , then the world’s largest, but Prime Minister Clement Attlee opted instead to tighten the economic boycott [17] while using Iranian agents to undermine Mosaddegh’s government. [18] : 3 Judging Mosaddegh to be unreliable and fearing a Communist takeover in Iran, UK prime minister Winston Churchill and the Eisenhower administration decided to overthrow Iran’s government, though the preceding Truman administration had opposed a coup, fearing the precedent that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) involvement would set. [18] : 3 British intelligence officials’ conclusions and the UK government’s solicitations were instrumental in initiating and planning the coup, despite the fact that the U.S. government in 1952 had been considering unilateral action (without UK support) to assist the Mosaddegh government. [19] [20] [21] Following the coup in 1953, a government under General Fazlollah Zahedi was formed which allowed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi , the last Shah of Iran ( Persian for an Iranian king), [22] to rule more firmly as monarch . He relied heavily on United States support to hold on to power. [13] [14] [15] [23] According to the CIA’s declassified documents and records, some of the most feared mobsters in Tehran were hired by the CIA to stage pro-Shah riots on 19 August. [5] Other men paid by the CIA were brought into Tehran in buses and trucks, and took over the streets of the city. [24] Between 200 [3] and 300 [4] people were killed because of the conflict. Mosaddegh was arrested, tried and convicted of treason by the Shah’s military court. On 21 December 1953, he was sentenced to three years in jail, then placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life. [25] : 280 [26] [27] Other Mosaddegh supporters were imprisoned, and several received the death penalty. [15] After the

Trump wanted to be shady buy was pretty inept.

Trump he stole from the American people, put his cronies in Secretary positions they wanted to destroy, hid Covid information because he wanted it to kill the citizens in blue states, incited an insurrection because he lost a free and fair election, allowed the Russians to effect the 2016 election, used his power to get his daughter multiple contracts in China, refused to give up his companies, rolled back environmental protections so his billionaire friends could make more money,, and many, many more crimes were committed that I don’t have time to list.

Andrew Jackson: His treatment of native americans was shameful. Many have committed crimes against them since but he started cheating natives out of land a decade before he ever took office and he had a financial interest in some of the lands he took. He also commited numerous war crimes in his time overseeing New Orleans, not even mentioning that he won the battle of New Orleans AFTER the war ended.

Andrew Jackson in the Persian Gulf

The Suleimani assassination is the kind of tactic Trump promised his voters — but without a strategy to match.

There’s a witticism that makes the rounds on Twitter whenever Donald Trump does something particularly plutocratic or corrupt, a variation on the following: Look, this is what all those folks in Midwestern diners voted for. The sarcastic point being either that

  • Trump’s populism was a con with blue-collar voters as its mark, or else that
  • Trump’s supporters professed to care about his populist promises only as a means to own the libs.

But with the assassination of Qassim Suleimani, I’m afraid that I must deploy the one-liner seriously: This was, in fact, exactly what a certain kind of Trump supporter voted for — including both the downscale, disaffected conservatives who turned out for him in the primary and the blue-collar Obama-Trump moderates who tipped the Midwest in the general election.

Not the killing of Suleimani specifically; like Trump himself on the campaign trail, some of these voters wouldn’t be able to tell the Quds Force from the Kurds. But the strategic spirit behind the killing, the preference for a single act of vengeance over more ambitious forms of intervention, the belief in the hardest possible counterpunch, the dismissal of norms and rules and cautious habits that constrain the violence that America deals out … all this is what Trump promised in the 2016 campaign, with his simultaneous dismissal of both neoconservatism and liberal internationalism and his pledge to crush America’s enemies by any means.

This combined promise was not a contradiction; it was an expression of a practical philosophy of foreign policy, usefully called Jacksonianism, that many Americans and especially many white and rural and working-class Americans have always tended to embrace.

The phrase “Jacksonian” belongs to the foreign policy scholar Walter Russell Mead, part of a famous typology in which he divides American foreign policy tendencies into four worldviews:

  1. Hamiltonian,
  2. Wilsonian,
  3. Jacksonian and
  4. Jeffersonian.

The worldviews are simplifications (“intended to be suggestive and evocative,” in Mead’s words), and they inevitably frustrate many scholars; nonetheless, they remain a useful way of thinking about how, in our imperial era, American foreign policy tends to work.

The Hamiltonians are the business-minded internationalists, cold-eyed and stability-oriented and wary of wars that seem idealistic rather than self-interested.

The Wilsonians are the idealists, whether neoconservative or liberal-humanitarian, who regard the United States military as a force for spreading democracy and protecting human rights.

  • Most foreign policy elites belong to one of these two groups,
  • both political parties include both tendencies in their upper echelons, and
  • most recent presidencies have been defined by internal conflicts between the two.

But far more American voters are either Jacksonians or Jeffersonians.

The Jeffersonian impulse, more common on the left than on the right, is toward a “come home, America” retreat from empire that regards global hegemony as a corrupting folly and America’s wars as mostly unwise and unjust. (“No blood for oil” is the defining Jeffersonian attitude toward all our Middle Eastern misadventures.) The Jacksonian tendency, more common on the right than on the left, is toward a pugilistic nationalism that’s wary of all international entanglements but ready for war whenever threats arise. (“More rubble, less trouble” is the essential Jacksonian credo.)

Since neither tendency has that much purchase in the imperial capital, it’s a safe bet that at any given moment in Washington, D.C., elites in both political parties will be trying to mobilize Jacksonian or Jeffersonian sentiment to achieve Hamiltonian or Wilsonian ends.

But when elites of both persuasions preside over too many calamities, you can get Jeffersonians and Jacksonians as important presidential contenders in their own right — think of George McGovern and George Wallace when the Vietnam War went bad. And when one party’s elite loses control of the electoral process entirely, it turns out that you can get an actual Jacksonian in the White House.

Yes, not everything Trump has done fits Mead’s paradigm — but a great deal of what makes him different from previous presidents is plainly Jacksonian.

  • A Hamiltonian wouldn’t have saber-rattled so wildly against North Korea;
  • a Wilsonian wouldn’t be so subsequently eager for a deal with such an odious regime.
  • A Hamiltonian wouldn’t be as eager for an extended trade war with China;
  • a Wilsonian would speak out more clearly against Beijing’s human rights abuses instead of just treating them as one more bargaining chip.
  • Trump’s bureaucracy-impeded attempts to pull out of Syria and Afghanistan are patently Jacksonian;
  • likewise his disdain for his predecessor’s negotiations on climate change. His
  • eagerness to pardon war criminals and
  • threaten war crimes, meanwhile, are Jacksonianism at its worst.

What is the best of Jacksonianism? I would say it’s the capacity to identify and prioritize threats, an area where Wilsonians get way too expansive and ambitious (“make the world safe for democracy,” “an end to evil”), while Hamiltonians sometimes let realpolitik blind them to ideological enmities that can’t be negotiated away.

To the extent that Trump’s foreign policy has been a useful corrective to his predecessors, and better than what other Republican candidates might have offered, it’s been because of his attempts at just such a prioritization. The execution has been, inevitably, Trumpy, but the goals —

  • drawing down in Syria and Central Asia,
  • confronting China while de-escalating with North Korea,
  • burden-shifting to other NATO powers in Europe while
  • keeping our relationship with Russia cool but short of Cold War hostility — are more strategically reasonable than the Bushian and Clintonite forms of interventionism that Trump campaigned against.

But in Trump’s Iran policy we may be seeing the limits of Jacksonianism, or at least a Jacksonianism that operates in strategic contexts that its own impulses did not create.

The Iranian government is indeed our enemy, to an extent that the Hamiltonians in the Obama administration sometimes underestimated, and in that sense Trump’s hawkishness toward the mullahs fits with his Jacksonian approach. But the Tehran regime’s capacity and inclination to cause problems for America also reflect our regional presence, posture and alliances, which mostly exist to advance a kind of mixtape of Hamiltonian and Wilsonian grand strategies

  • access to Middle Eastern oil, the
  • promotion of democracy and human rights, and
  • regime change in Tehran itself.

None of these are naturally Jacksonian goals, especially now that America is more energy independent than when the Carter Doctrine was formulated or the first Iraq War fought. Were America’s Iran policy fully Jacksonian we might still be at loggerheads with Tehran, but we wouldn’t be nearly so invested in projecting power in the Persian Gulf, and there would be fewer natural flash points and fewer targets for Iranian attacks.

But so long as Trump is working within an inherited Hamiltonian-Wilsonian strategic framework, his Jacksonian tactical approach — in the Suleimani case, picking the most surprising and dramatic option on the military board of retaliatory options — is unlikely to serve his official goal of escaping endless Middle Eastern entanglements. Instead, it points to either

  • a permanent retaliatory cycle with the Iranians — we hit hard, they hit hard, we hit a little harder, ad infinitum — or else
  • disastrous ground war in a nonessential theater, the least Jacksonian of ends.

Precisely because I think Trump’s Jacksonianism is fundamentally sincere, I don’t think the full-scale war scenario is particularly likely. And since I’ve written numerous columns, before his election and since, about Trump as geopolitical destabilizer without anything as bad as Obama’s still-unfolding Libya folly yet ensuing, it’s important to stress that the fallout from the Suleimani gambit could be less dramatic than the panicked punditry expects. Indeed, if the dead general was really the Islamic Republic’s Stonewall Jackson, its asymmetric strategy’s indispensable man, then over the long run his death might benefit American interests more than any subsequent escalation hurts them.

But the most likely near-term consequence of Suleimani’s death is an escalation in hostilities that looks to most Americans like more of the endless war that Trump campaigned against. In which case some war-weary voters might decide that if they really want out of futile Middle Eastern conflicts electing a ruthless Jacksonian is not enough; only a peace-seeking Jeffersonian will do.

And it just so happens that a genuine left-wing Jeffersonian, Bernie Sanders, is currently near the top of the Democratic field, contending with Joe Biden, the embodiment of the Hamiltonian-Wilsonian elite dialectic despite his blue-collar lingo, in an increasingly spirited foreign policy debate.

If the establishment’s follies gave us Trump’s Jacksonian presidency, in other words, the question before the Democratic electorate is whether the perils of Trumpism require that we give that establishment another chance — or whether putting a Jeffersonian in charge of an empire built by Hamiltonians and Wilsonians is the only reasonable option left.

Mnuchin’s excuse for delaying the Harriet Tubman $20 bill is insulting

It is more likely that Mr. Mnuchin, as the New York Times reported, feared President Trump would cause an uproar with an outright cancellation of a bill bearing Tubman’s image. As a candidate, Mr. Trump criticized the decision as “political correctness,” and he has made no secret of his admiration for President Andrew Jackson, whose image Tubman would have dislodged from the front of the $20 bill.

Some would argue there are bigger issues facing the country than who is on the $20 bill, and no doubt the administration is guilty of far more serious offenses. But symbols matter. Backpedaling on putting the first African American woman on paper money tells women and girls and people of color that they don’t — and never have — mattered. Mr. Trump has found yet another way to show that he does not really aspire to be president of all Americans.