Dead Presidents

Charles P. Pierce's Top 10 Presidents in American history, ranked for America's 250 birthday and published in Esquire's Summer 2026 issue.

Here are a few books that are not just general histories of the Vice Presidency, but examine some of the President-Vice President relationships through the years:

•First in Line: Presidents, Vice Presidents, and the Pursuit of Power (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Kate Andersen Brower [2018]

•American Roulette: The History and Dilemma of the Vice Presidency by Donald Young [1972]

•Crapshoot: Rolling the Dice on the Vice Presidency by Jules Witcover [1992]

•The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power (BOOK | KINDLE) by Jules Witcover [2014]

•The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden (BOOK | KINDLE) by Joel Goldstein [2016]

And these are even more directly focused on specific Administrations:

•Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Gordon S. Wood [2017]

•Jefferson's Vendetta: The Pursuit of Aaron Burr and the Judiciary (BOOK | KINDLE) by Joseph Wheelan [2005]

•The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961 (BOOK | KINDLE) by Irwin F. Gellman [2015]

•Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Jeffrey Frank [2013]

•The Johnson Eclipse: A President's Vice Presidency by Leonard Baker [1966]

•In His Steps: Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedy Mystique by Paul R. Henggeler [1991]

•Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew (BOOK | KINDLE) by Jules Witcover [2007]

•Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Peter Baker [2013]

•Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Barton Gellman [2008]

"I am living, breathing proof the Democrats can win anywhere and we should be fighting everywhere!" -- Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky

Mr. Beshear, who seems to be everywhere on the 2026 midterms circuit, is in demand as a surrogate for Democrats in frontline races, all while positioning himself for an expected Presidential run in 2028. Democrats who urgently need to be competitive in more states if they are to win back Congress and eventually the White House, see hope in Beshear, a twice-elected Democratic governor of a deep-red state that President Trump won by 30 points in 2024... ...In Kentucky, Mr. Beshear remains popular despite his support for abortion rights and his veto in 2023 of a bill that placed sweeping restrictions on transgender youth. A statewide poll in February showed that 52 percent of Kentucky voters approved of the job he was doing as governor, including 81 percent of Democrats, 50 percent of independents, and 30 percent of Republicans.

One morning, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt entered the Oval Office to find Donald Trump clutching a tube of superglue and attempting to affix gold decorations to the marble fireplace mantel. As he was known to prefer his own aesthetic handiwork to anyone else's, the sight of the President squeezing glue onto gilded appliqués and mounting them on the wall himself surprised no one in his inner circle.

Trump's first wife, Ivana, the vice president of interior design at his company, had had a penchant for gilding everything. It was Ivana who was said to have first encouraged the gold obsession that soon became a hallmark of her husband's properties. Gold projected the ostentation that would be Trump's brand and he reveled in its glow. His signature New York City building would beat the words "TRUMP TOWER" in gold letters and boast gold-hued elevator doors and escalators; gold silk lined the walls of the bedroom on his private plane, he draped himself in bling for the cover of Esquire, and he would eventually sell gold sneakers.

The Oval Office had always been deliberately understated -- a reminder that the United States was a republic, not a monarchy, and the President's office was not a palace. Trump had gone along with that tradition in his first term. In his second term, he would unleash his inner Louis XIV.

Every President had put his own stamp on the White House. In 1909, William Howard Taft bathed the original Oval Office expansion of the West Wing in olive green. Some critics at the time imagined that Taft's greenery was an homage to the natural beauty of America, but in fact Taft just liked green.

Similarly, Trump now brought gold. Golden urns and chalices would replace the tufty green Swedish ivy on the mantelpiece -- which had graved the Oval Office for many decades before Trump. As the year progressed, he kept jamming more gold pieces onto the mantel. When Trump asked White House residence staff what they thought of the glittering display, most responses were muted, but his devout aide Natalie Harp would gush with delight.

Gold cherubs flitted about in the pediments above doorways. Golden molding encircled the room, a golden Presidential seal beckoned like heaven from the recessed ceiling above, and golden appliqués festooned the hearth and walls, alongside ornate gold-framed paintings from the vast art collections of the federal government. Trump called the antique golden urns plucked from the White House collection "cash," and would tell people: "See that cash? People look at it, all they see is cash."

-- Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

Vice President Spiro Agnew's resignation letter from October 10, 1973 and President Richard Nixon's resignation letter from August 9, 1974.

Title 3, Section 20 of the United States Code of Laws mandates that "an instrument in writing" must be delivered to the Secretary of State in order for the President or Vice President of the United States to resign from or refuse to accept their respective offices.

The answer is definitely Vietnam. But even with the Vietnam War, most Presidential historians have consistently ranked him as one of the ten best Presidents. The breakdown of results of the survey of Presidential historians done every few years by C-SPAN clearly shows how great he is considered in the categories that aren't dominated by Vietnam:

Do you share my concern that Democrats tend to fixate on Trump, rather than on elections and winning back power?

Yes, I agree. The focus should be on the midterms and the fact that President Trump has flushed practically any form of dissent or moderation from the Republican Party through his endorsements of the most extreme of the extremists, state-by-state, throughout the entire primary season.

Instead of the Reflecting Pool or The Kennedy Center or the ballroom or the UFC fight that was held at the White House, Democrats should be showing voters just who these people are that Trump has endorsed over more traditional Republican incumbents during this cycle.

But more than anything, Democrats should be hammering home how desperate things are for Americans economically because of the disastrous war with Iran that Trump launched (and, let's be honest: a war that we did not win). There'a a direct line from the war to millions of Americans struggling to pay for gas and groceries and utilities. Democrats should be buying up ad time and playing Trump's dismissive comments about inflation and skyrocketing cost-of-living while pointing out how he and his family are making a shitload of money while we all struggle. He's literally sitting in the Oval Office super gluing more gold shit on the walls while people can't pay for groceries or gasoline.

Here is an English translation of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's full statement responding to President Trump's weird lie that she "begged" for a photo with him at the G7 Summit this week and pointing out the differences in how Trump deals with traditional American allies compared to how he interacts with authoritarians:

"Some things deserve an immediate response. Donald Trump's statements are completely fabricated. I'm frankly shocked. I don't know why the President of the United States behaves this way towards his own allies, and it's not the first time it's happened.

I can only say that it's a shame he doesn't have the same determination with the enemies of the West, with the enemies of the United States, with leadership with which he instead appears much more accommodating.

"I don't know why the President of the United States behaves this way with his own allies. It's not, after all, the first time this has happened."

-- Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, on President Trump's behavior at the latest G7 Summit and after Trump lied to an Italian television network that she had begged him for a photo at the meeting.

Captain & Tennille, a soft-rock duo popular in the day, energetically performed their hit, "Muskrat Love." ("A cute little song," Betty Ford said later, dismissing those who were aghast.) As the title suggests, the lyrics tell the tale of a romantic encounter between two rodents named Susie and Sam. Now he's ticklin' her fancy, rubbin' her toes Muzzle to muzzle now, anything goes. Or, as the British ambassador described it afterward in a tongue-in-cheek aside to London, "a vivid electronic tone-poem on muskrat courship." Those Americans! After that, [President] Ford, in white tie and tails, and [Queen] Elizabeth, in an organza gown of citrus yellow and a tiara, walked to the dance floor in the State Dining Room. The Marine Band launched into the next song on its playlist. Which happened to be "The Lady Is a Tramp." Ford, who typically masked his occasional temper beneath a mild demeanor, was reportedly so angry by the inadvertent juxtaposition that he was "incandescent." "Somebody made a big mistake," [First daughter} Susan Ford Bales said. The Queen reportedly thought it was "hilarious." It was nearly 1 a.m. before the royal couple left the party to return to Blair House.

-- The interesting (and unfortunate) music choices during a state dinner hosted by President Gerald Ford at the White House honoring Queen Elizabeth II when she visited the United States to mark the Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, July 7, 1976.