Is Trump “America’s Greatest President”?

At a rally in Pennsylvania earlier this evening, President Trump boasted, “We have done more than any first-term administration in the history of our country.”

After just 14 months in office, Trump believes he has already compiled a better first-term record than all 43 of predecessors.

To support this claim, Trump listed the following achievements: “regulation, tax cuts, federal judges, a great, great Supreme Court justice… the biggest tax cut in the history of our country… And you know what helped? When AT&T and the big companies came, they started paying thousands and thousands of dollars of bonuses to, you know, millions of people. I think it’s up to 5 billion people now… But we also got rid of the individual mandate from Obamacare, which basically guts out Obamacare, that’ll be next….”

Some of that is true.

Trump has indeed cut federal regulations with a vigor unmatched since Warren Harding and Ronald Reagan. (The Harding and Reagan deregulations helped produce robust booms in the ’20s and ’80s, followed respectively by the worst and second-worst economic crises of the 20th century — the Great Depression and the Reagan/Bush recession of 1988–91.)

Thanks to longstanding Senate obstruction of Obama appointees, Trump has also had the opportunity to appoint a large number…