Ranking Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden
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Ranking Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden is John Kiriakou's answer to a viewer who asked him and Ted Rall to rank the four presidents and to say which they would live under for the rest of their lives.

His first pass was comparative and reluctant. "I hated George W. Bush. I hated Barack Obama." He nonetheless chose Obama, "because he presented the least bad outward-looking face to the world, even though he was busily droning people in places like Pakistan and pissing people off all over the place that we didn't know about." Bush he judged reckless.

Then he reversed himself in the next breath: "You know what? In good conscience, I just can't with Obama." The reason is personal and institutional at once, "He prosecuted me, and not just me, but seven other whistleblowers", and his verdict on the record is categorical: Obama is "the worst, harshest enemy of whistleblowers in American history."

What compounded it, in his account, was the political cover it enjoyed: "that was peak brunch Democrats, too. Everybody went home and put their protest signs in the closet because Obama was president."

He added a foreign-policy indictment on top, that Obama destroyed Libya, and also Syria, part of Somalia and Honduras, and the appointments that went with it: "he appointed not just Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, but Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. So, no thank you."

The remaining field

Bush was disposed of in a sentence: "Bush was a war criminal. So that's a hard no." Donald Trump he treated as two different presidencies that "almost have to be separated", good on some measures in the first term, then reckless with COVID, though Kiriakou gave him credit for approving the vaccine quickly, doubting a President Hillary Clinton would have done so.

That left Joe Biden, and the reasoning for choosing him is an absence rather than an achievement: "Biden was having no president at all, basically. Everything was on autopilot." Kiriakou's gloss on that is generous to the system if not to the man, "I guess you could say it's a tribute to the American system that it survived that", and his conclusion is comparative: "For me personally, the least damaging of all those presidents was Joe Biden."

See also

- Barack Obama
- Joe Biden
- George W. Bush
- The chilling effect of whistleblower prosecutions
