Bush 43 through today, with the counting rules attached.
Standing rule: no scores. Color marks whether something is in force, reversed, contested, concluded, or permanent, not good or bad.
Unscored · 100 entries · last change August 18, 2026
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Color is a legal fact, not an opinion. It shows (whether something is still in force, was reversed, or is contested in court), never whether it was good or bad.
Click a figure that has an entry to see the documents and how strongly the number can be tied to the action (). A few macro counts (gross debt, this-term jobs, this-term judges) have no matching entry, so they stay unlinked rather than pointed at the wrong document.
Nothing here is scored, graded, or ranked. When two credible sources disagree, this archive shows both numbers instead of picking one.
Wins are in here too. See or filter the Ledger by .
Nobody is asking you to trust a byline. There isn’t one — the archive is anonymous, on purpose, which is exactly why it has to be checkable without one. See and check one entry against its own source yourself.
Handle with care: this is the most abused chart type in politics
Every number below would be labeled in the entry ledger, the archive’s weakest attribution level, meaning it happened during the term and causation is not established. Presidents do not control employment, debt, or growth; Congress, the Federal Reserve, global demand and shocks do most of the work. These are shown because you should be able to see them, with the counting rules attached rather than buried.
Trump II so far: 20 of 48 months
His own numbers, standing alone, before any comparison. These are not annualized and not projected. They are what has happened, with the window stated on each.
Against the last four presidents: full term totals
Trump II’s bars are hatched throughout to mark a partial term. The 20-month figure sitting beside a completed eight-year one is the single easiest way to mislead with this chart, so the incompleteness is visible in the bar itself rather than only in a footnote. The section below this one fixes the comparison itself rather than just labeling it.
Total debt added over the term
$ trillions, gross national debt, start to end of term
G.W. Bush
2001–09
$6.1T
Obama
2009–17
$8.3T
Trump I
2017–21
$8.2T
Biden
2021–25
$8.5T
Trump II
2025– (18 mo)
$2.8T so far
Trump II: debt rose from $36.22T at inauguration to roughly $39T by March 2026. Reported figures range $2.2T–$2.8T depending on the cut-off date and whether you use Treasury daily totals or the Fed quarterly series. The bar shows the upper end; the range is the honest answer. Counting method matters enormously across all five: a president’s first nine months run on his predecessor’s budget.
Debt added per year in office
$ trillions per year — term length normalized
G.W. Bush
2001–09
$0.8T
Obama
2009–17
$1.0T
Trump I
2017–21
$2.0T
Biden
2021–25
$2.1T
Trump II
2025– (18 mo)
$2.4T so far
The same data divided by years served, which is the only fair way to set a partial or four-year term beside an eight-year one. Trump II is running at roughly $2.4T/year; the Joint Economic Committee reported debt $2.77T higher year-over-year as of April 2026. Note that this normalization reverses the ranking above.
Net change in nonfarm employment
millions of jobs, first to last month of term
G.W. Bush
2001–09
+5.20M
Obama
2009–17
+7.10M
Trump I
2017–21
−2.10M
Biden
2021–25
+16.10M
Trump II
2025– (18 mo)
+0.72M so far
One source, one method, for internal consistency. Trump II: +716,000 from January 2025 to June 2026 — against +2,007,000 in the preceding 17 months. Private-sector jobs rose 902,000; the gap is federal employment, down 324,000. Trump I includes the pandemic collapse. Other credible methods put Obama near +11.6M using a different start baseline.
Article III judges confirmed
lifetime federal judgeships
G.W. Bush
2001–09
327
Obama
2009–17
329
Trump I
2017–21
234
Biden
2021–25
235
Trump II
2025– (18 mo)
53 so far
Trump II: 53 confirmed as of August 1, 2026 (10 appellate, 42 district, 1 Court of International Trade) — slightly ahead of the 44 confirmed at the same point in 2018, but the pipeline is far thinner. Only 60 nominees had been submitted versus 137 by this date in 2018. Trump II also inherited 50 vacancies against 119 in 2017.
Executive orders issued
count, by Federal Register publication date, start to end of term
G.W. Bush
2001–09
299
Obama
2009–17
295
Trump I
2017–21
212
Biden
2021–25
170
Trump II
2025– (18 mo)
276 so far
The one metric on this page that answers a specific question a libertarian reviewer asked and the site previously had no way to answer: does executive power get counted the same regardless of party. Counted directly from the Federal Register’s own document index by publication date within each term’s window — reproducible by querying the same API with the same date bounds. A handful of EOs published in the exact transition week can fall on either side of this count versus the Federal Register’s own internal president-tagging, which is a separate, looser field; that is a known few-count margin, not a missing order. Proclamations and memoranda are excluded — several hundred to over a thousand per term, mostly ceremonial (“National X Day”) or routine, and not a meaningful signal of executive power one way or the other.
Where every term stood at this point in office
Trump II is 619 days into his second term. Every row below measures every other term over that same number of days from its own start, never a full-term total set beside a partial one. Chronological order only; the ordering is never by outcome, because a list of presidents ranked by these numbers is the scoreboard this archive does not publish.
Federal debt added
$ billions, first vs. last observation within 619 days of each term's start
← scroll for every figure →
Richard Nixonterm ended first
+$0.02T
Gerald Ford
+$0.13T
Jimmy Carter
+$0.11T
Ronald Reagan, first term
+$0.23T
Ronald Reagan, second term
+$0.44T
George H. W. Bush
+$0.56T
Bill Clinton, first term
+$0.45T
Bill Clinton, second term
+$0.24T
George W. Bush, first term
+$0.68T
George W. Bush, second term
+$0.84T
Barack Obama, first term
+$2.48T
Barack Obama, second term
+$1.40T
Donald Trump, first term
+$2.13T
Joe Biden
+$2.89T
Donald Trump, second term
+$2.85T
FRED GFDEBTN, quarterly. A quarterly series can only snap to the nearest real observation on both ends, so each window is close to but not exactly the same length — never off by more than about two quarters, tightest for terms that started near a quarter boundary.
Nonfarm employment added
thousands of jobs, first vs. last observation within 619 days of each term's start
← scroll for every figure →
Richard Nixonterm ended first
+2.60M
Gerald Ford
+0.68M
Jimmy Carter
+6.97M
Ronald Reagan, first term
−2.20M
Ronald Reagan, second term
+3.62M
George H. W. Bush
+1.95M
Bill Clinton, first term
+5.41M
Bill Clinton, second term
+5.28M
George W. Bush, first term
−2.17M
George W. Bush, second term
+3.81M
Barack Obama, first term
−2.70M
Barack Obama, second term
+4.25M
Donald Trump, first term
+3.68M
Joe Biden
+10.56M
Donald Trump, second term
+0.77M
FRED PAYEMS, monthly, seasonally adjusted. Monthly data snaps far tighter than quarterly — every window here lands within about two months of the requested span.
Unemployment rate at this point
percent, level at the observation closest to 619 days into each term
← scroll for every figure →
Richard Nixonterm ended first
5.5%
Gerald Ford
7.7%
Jimmy Carter
5.8%
Ronald Reagan, first term
10.4%
Ronald Reagan, second term
7.0%
George H. W. Bush
5.9%
Bill Clinton, first term
5.8%
Bill Clinton, second term
4.5%
George W. Bush, first term
5.7%
George W. Bush, second term
4.4%
Barack Obama, first term
9.4%
Barack Obama, second term
5.7%
Donald Trump, first term
3.8%
Joe Biden
3.6%
Donald Trump, second term
4.1%
FRED UNRATE, monthly, seasonally adjusted. This one is a level, not a change — the rate a term inherited matters as much as where it moved, and collapsing that into a delta would hide which terms started from a recession.
Why cross-president comparison goes wrong
Presidents do not control most of these numbers
Employment, debt, and growth are driven by Congress, the Federal Reserve, global demand, demographics, and shocks nobody chose. Every metric on this page would be labeled Contextual in the entry ledger — the weakest attribution level the archive has. They are shown because you asked, and labeled because that is the deal.
Inherited conditions dominate the first year
A president’s first nine months run on a budget his predecessor signed. Obama inherited the financial crisis; Trump I inherited the longest expansion on record and then a pandemic; Biden inherited a recovery already underway. None of them chose their starting line.
Term length breaks raw totals
Comparing an eight-year total to a four-year total is the single most common abuse of this chart type. That is why the per-year view sits directly beneath the raw one, and why it reverses the ranking.
Data gets revised, sometimes sharply
BLS benchmark revisions cut roughly 911,000 jobs from a previously reported 12-month figure. Anyone quoting a jobs number without a vintage is quoting a number that has already changed.
Trump II is incomplete — the bars say so
Eighteen months of forty-eight. Its figures are real measurements, not projections, and its bars are hatched everywhere they appear so the incompleteness travels with the number. The one place a rate is shown — debt per year — is labeled a rate, because extrapolating a partial term to four years produces a forecast wearing the clothes of a measurement.
Cherry-picking is trivially easy here
Any single one of these 5 metrics can be selected to flatter or damn any of these five presidents. That is not a flaw in the data; it is what happens when you rank complex outcomes by a single number. The defense is showing all of them together, with the counting rules attached.