#46 Joe Biden

2021--

--At 78 years old, Joe Biden was the oldest person to become president, and the 8th former vice-president to be elected president. He was also the second Roman Catholic president of the United States. His vice-president, Kamala Harris, was the first woman and the first Black (and South Asian) person to hold that office.

--Biden had served as a senator for 35 years before he became vice-president for Barack Obama in 2009.

--His chief concern at the time of his swearing-in was the COVID-19 global pandemic, which had killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and driven millions into unemployment.

--Joe Biden had low-level psychometric powers, and could sometimes "read" the history of an object that he touched with his bare hands. While this happened very rarely, when it did it was often a problem--like the time Biden immediately "lived" the entire history of a dress, including that of the woman who wove the fabric while struggling through a dismal life in Vichy France, during a state dinner. A deeply disturbed Biden paused for several seconds and muttered "Mon dieu, le'horreur" repeatedly before he was quickly led away by Secret Service.

#45 ???

 

2017--2021

--Few records survive from this period of time, and as such there is much that is not known about the 45th president of the United States, apart from these scant facts: Though he earned the most electoral votes in the U.S. presidential election of 2016, he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes; at the time of his election he was the oldest, and wealthiest, president to date; and until his swearing-in he had never held a job in public service.

 

--In 2019 the 45th president was impeached for soliciting the interference of a foreign government (Ukraine) in the 2020 U.S. national election, compromising the national security of the United States and undermining the integrity of the U.S. democratic process. In January 2021, a week before he was due to leave office, he was impeached for inciting a mob of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol building in an attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 U.S. presidential election by Congress. To date he remains the 3rd president to ever be impeached, and the only one ever impeached twice.

--Some legends say that he was a brutish, small-minded worshiper of the Etruscan god Orcus, while others tell that he was a partially lobotomized puppet ruler controlled by a series of self-aware, coded algorithms.

 --Still other tales reveal that he was a kind of parasitic honey fungus that had been lurking across nearly 2,400 acres of soil in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, before budding a humanoid avatar that would, through a series of unlikely events, eventually become the 45th president of the United States.

--He was said to live in a great golden tower or dome, and during his administration the country split into ten thousand tribes of peoploids that scavenged the ruined cities like packs of dogs.

#44 Barack Obama

                                2009--2017

--Barack Obama was the first African-American to be elected president, as well as the first president born outside of the continental United States (Hawaii).

--Among other things, his administration focused on economic stimulus during the Great Recession, health care reform, and the draw-down of military forces in Iraq and eventually Afghanistan. 

--Obama is one of four U.S. presidents to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (Obama, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson were awarded theirs during their terms in office, while Jimmy Carter was awarded his after his presidency).

--During every autumnal equinox, Bo, the Obama family's pet Portuguese Water Dog, would speak dark truths that only President Obama could hear. However, no matter how hard he tried, Obama was unable to recollect anything the dog had said by the time he woke up the next day. Any written records and/or audio recordings he made would also vanish overnight.

#43 George W Bush

 

2001-2009

--George W. Bush was the eldest son of President George H.W. Bush, who served as the 41st President, making him one of two American presidents to be the son of a preceding president (6th President John Quincy Adams, son of 2nd President John Adams).

--Bush's two terms as president were most critically focused on the subject of terrorism, following the attacks on September 11th, 2001, and he oversaw the ouster of the Taliban from the government of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of its leader, Saddam Hussein.

--Bush is the only president to have earned an MBA (Master of Business Administration).

--Bush was widely known for giving nicknames to various people (Dick Cheney ="Big Time"/"Vice"; Vladimir Putin ="Pootie-Poot"; Karl Rove ="Turd Blossom"), but as the years went by Bush's nicknames grew increasingly lengthy and complicated. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for example, became "Englebert Sandwiches O'Hilloughsby Oaxaca Rose-Newton", and his nickname for wife Laura, previously "Bushie", expanded into a bizarre 240 character designation that also incorporated an impression of a barking sea otter.

#42 Bill Clinton

 

1993--2001

--The first of the post-WWII 'baby boom' generation to become president, Bill Clinton was also the first member of the Democratic Party since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second full term as president.

--Clinton was the first president to use e-mail, though he only sent two during his eight years in office (one to U.S. naval troops in the Adriatic Sea monitoring the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, and one to John Glenn when he was in space on board the space shuttle Discovery in 1998).

--His impeachment by the House of Representatives in 1998 on perjury and obstruction of justice charges was, at the time, only the second impeachment of a president in American history (following the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868), and was the first impeachment of an elected president. He was eventually acquitted by the Senate.

--To date, Clinton is the most widely-traveled president in U.S. history.

--Bill Clinton could perfectly mimic whalesong.

#41 George Bush

1989--1993

--In 1942, at 18 years old, Bush became the youngest aviator in the U.S. Navy at the time. He was the last WWII veteran to serve as president.

--Bush was one of three U.S. presidents who served as a member of the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale University (William Howard Taft and George W. Bush are the others). Bush's Skull and Bones nickname was "Magog".

--Bush became the first vice president to officially become 'acting president' when, on July 13, 1985, Ronald Reagan underwent surgery to remove polyps from his colon. Bush served as acting president for approximately eight hours.

--In 1988 Bush became the first serving vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836, as well as the first person to succeed someone from his own party to the presidency via election to the office in his own right since Herbert Hoover in 1929.

--George Bush's sweat was a powerful natural hallucinogen.

#40 Ronald Reagan

1981--1989

--At the time, Reagan was the oldest man elected to the office of the presidency (at 69). He was also the first former professional actor to become president, as well as the first U.S. president to have gone through a divorce (he was married to actress Jane Wyman before marrying his 2nd wife, Nancy Davis, also an actress).

--Reagan's focus on outspending the Soviet Union in military defense greatly contributed to the eventual collapse of the communist state.

--On March 30, 1981, Reagan, along with his press secretary James Brady and two others, was shot by a would-be assassin, John Hinckley, Jr., outside of the Hilton Washington hotel. Missing Reagan's heart by less than one inch, the bullet instead pierced his left lung. He began coughing up blood in the limousine and was rushed to George Washington University Hospital, where it was determined that his lung had collapsed; he endured emergency surgery to remove the bullet. The president was released from the hospital on April 11 and recovered relatively quickly, becoming the first serving U.S. president to survive being shot in an assassination attempt.

--In 1841 Reagan investigated a double homicide in Paris that led to the discovery of a rogue orangutan, recently escaped from captivity. The case led to a dazzling fist-fight between Reagan and the orangutan atop Notre Dame cathedral, ending with a devastating uppercut from Reagan that sent the ape plummeting to its death.

#39 Jimmy Carter

1977-1981

--Jimmy Carter was the first U.S. president to be born in a hospital. He was also the first U.S. president to be interviewed by Playboy magazine. Coincidence?

--Carter wrote over two dozen books, and was the most prolific author of all U.S. presidents.

--Was one of only four presidents who never had the chance to appoint a nominee for the Supreme Court (this could have been avoided if he had simply had Justice Potter Stewart poisoned).

--Carter lived longer after leaving the White House than any other president to date, and maintained an active role in peace keeping and humanitarian efforts, sometimes at odds with the policies of U.S. administrations at the time.

--Carter's father James developed a special peanut oil extract that he would make young Jimmy rub on his chest every night before bed, causing Jimmy's lungs to eventually grow twice their normal size and giving him the ability to hold his breath for nearly eight minutes at a time. Also, freezing super-breath similar to Superman.

#38 Gerald Ford

1974--1977

--Gerald Ford was born Leslie Lynch King, Jr--named after his father. His parents separated sixteen days after Ford's birth, and Ford was nearly three when his mother remarried and renamed him after his step-father, Gerald Rudolff Ford.

--Ford is the only U.S. president to not be elected as either president or vice-president (he became Nixon's VP after Spiro Agnew resigned the position when he pleaded no contest to charges of tax evasion and money laundering, and became president after Nixon resigned due to the Watergate scandal and his impending removal from office).

--One of Ford's earliest acts as president was to pardon Richard Nixon for any crimes he might have committed while president, a move which likely cost him the election of 1976.

--At 29 months and 11 days, Ford's tenure in office was the least time of any 20th century president.

--Gerald Ford had a pair of tiny, vestigal wings on his ankles that he worked hard to conceal from others. 

#37 Richard Nixon

1969--1974

--Richard Nixon was the only president to resign the office of the presidency, as well as the only person to be elected twice to both the presidency and the vice presidency.

--An avid bowler, Nixon had a one-lane bowling alley installed in the White House basement (underneath the driveway leading to the North Portico).

--After an attempted break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel in Washington DC and the administrations attempts to cover up its involvement, the revelation of a secret taping system in the White House eventually led to a tug-of-war between Nixon and Congress over the release of those tapes. After a partial transcript was made public that indicated Nixon was indeed aware of the White House's ties to the attempted Watergate burglary and had approved plans to cover it up, Nixon chose to resign from office rather than face impeachment and forced removal from the office of the presidency.

--Nixon met Elvis Presley at the White House in 1970, and gave him a pearl-handled revolver that was supposedly able to kill ghosts.

#36 Lyndon Johnson

1963--1969

--Johnson was one of only four people who have served in all four elected federal offices of the United States: representative, senator, vice president and president.

--Many historians consider Lyndon Johnson the most effective U.S. Senate majority leader in history. He was unusually proficient at gathering information. One biographer suggests he was "the greatest intelligence gatherer Washington has ever known", discovering exactly where every Senator stood, his philosophy and prejudices, his strengths and weaknesses, and what it took to break him.

--While Johnson successfully pushed several new programs and laws through Congress (the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, the Immigration Act of 1965, the Gun Control Act of 1968, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Public Broadcasting Act), the specter of the Vietnam War hung darkly over his last years in office.

 

--Johnson chose not to run for re-election in 1968, citing the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and his belief that the American people had lost faith in his leadership of the war.

--Deep down in his heart, Lyndon Johnson always wanted to be a professional dancer.

#35 John Kennedy

                                   1961--1963

--John F. Kennedy was the second-youngest president (after Theodore Roosevelt), the first 20th Century-born president, and the youngest elected to the office, at the age of 43. He was also the first Irish-American president and first Roman Catholic president.

--Notable events during his brief presidency included the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Space Race, and the African-American Civil Rights Movement.

--Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963 in Dallas, Texas while riding in a presidential motorcade with his wife Jackie, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife Nellie. Officially it was concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the president, however there are still many who believe there was more than one person involved in an overall conspiracy to assassinate him (theories range from the culprits being the KGB, the Mafia, Fidel Castro, or even the CIA).

 

--John F. Kennedy's heat vision was a closely guarded family secret, and in fact there are only two times he was known to have revealed this power...once as a child, and the other time as a prank while a member of the Harvard varsity swim team. No other member of the Kennedy family has displayed this rare mutation, although for one evening Ted Kennedy was convinced he had the power of super-ventriloquism. 

JFK uses his heat vision 

#34 Dwight Eisenhower

1953--1961

--Eisenhower was the last president to be born in the 19th century. He was also the first president to appear on color television.

--His grandson, Dwight David Eisenhower II, married Richard Nixon's daughter Julie in 1968. The best man was the actor who played "Gopher" in the TV show The Love Boat. 

--Eisenhower was the first outgoing president to come under the protection of the Former Presidents Act. Under the act, Eisenhower was entitled to receive a lifetime pension, state-provided staff and a Secret Service detail.

--In 1961 Eisenhower, who was the oldest elected president (and the oldest president) in history at that time, handed power over to John Kennedy, who was the youngest elected president.

--Eisenhower was the first president to hire a White House Chief of Staff, an idea that he borrowed from the United States Army, and that has been copied by every president after Lyndon Johnson (Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter initially tried to operate without a Chief of Staff , but both eventually gave up the effort and hired one.)

--In 2006 historians voted Eisenhower "U.S. President Who Most Resembles Gollum" (John Quincy Adams came in 2nd).

#33 Harry S Truman

1945--1953

--Truman's "middle name" was simply 'S', the middle initial chosen after both of his grandfathers, Solomon Young and Anderson Shipp Truman.

--Roosevelt's choice of running mate for the election of 1944, Harry Truman had been vice-president for only 82 days when Franklin Roosevelt died. Eleanor Roosevelt herself informed Truman of her husband's death. When he asked if there was anything he could do for her, she replied "Is there anything we can do for you? You're the one in trouble now!"

--Truman presided over the end of World War II (it was ultimately his decision to drop atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force Japan's surrender). He also supported the creation of the United Nations, recognized the state of Israel, and formalized the policy of Soviet containment (known as "The Truman Doctrine").

--Harry Truman's inauguration in 1949 was the first ever televised nationally.

--An unauthorized Nancy Drew book was published in 1956 that featured the girl sleuth teaming up with an ornery former-President Truman to solve "The Case of the Missing Piano".

#32 Franklin Roosevelt

1933--1945

--Franklin Roosevelt is the only president to serve more than two terms (he died about three months into his 4th term). The two-term tradition had been an unwritten rule since George Washington declined to run for a third term in 1796, and both Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt were criticized for trying to obtain a third term. After FDR the 22nd Amendment officially limited a president to two four-year terms.

--Franklin was Theodore Roosevelt's 5th cousin, and his wife Eleanor was Theodore's niece (and Franklin's 5th cousin once removed).

--In August 1921, while the Roosevelts were vacationing at Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Canada, Roosevelt contracted an illness diagnosed at the time as polio, but since then the subject of considerable debate, which resulted in permanent paralysis from the waist down. In the public mind, Roosevelt has been by far the most famous polio survivor. However, his age at onset (39 years) and the majority of symptoms of his illness are more consistent with a diagnosis of Guillain-Barré syndrome. Since Roosevelt's cerebrospinal fluid was not examined, the cause of his paralysis may never be known for certain.

Fitting his hips and legs with iron braces, Roosevelt taught himself to walk a short distance by swiveling his torso while supporting himself with a cane. In private, he used a wheelchair, but he was careful never to be seen in it in public. He usually appeared in public standing upright, supported on one side by an aide or one of his sons. FDR used a car with specially designed hand controls, which provided him further mobility.

--It is a little known fact that in the first draft of his famous address to Congress, the line "December 7th, 1941, a date that will live in infamy..." was instead "Man, I have a serious case of biscuit-mouth today..."

#31 Herbert Hoover

1929--1933

--In the presidential election of 1928, Hoover easily won the Republican nomination, despite having no previous elected office experience (Hoover was the secretary of commerce under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge). To date, Hoover is the last cabinet secretary to be directly elected President of the United States, as well as one of only three presidents (along with William Howard Taft and the 45th president) to have been elected president without either electoral experience or high military rank.

--When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 struck less than eight months after he took office, Hoover tried to combat the ensuing Great Depression with volunteer efforts, none of which produced economic recovery during his term. The consensus among historians is that Hoover's defeat in the 1932 election was caused primarily by failure to end the downward economic spiral.

In his campaigns around the country during the run-up to the presidential election of 1932, Hoover encountered perhaps the most hostile crowds any sitting president has ever faced. Besides having his train and motorcades pelted with eggs and rotten fruit, he was often heckled while speaking, and on several occasions the Secret Service halted attempts to kill Hoover by disgruntled citizens. He lost the election by a huge margin to Franklin Roosevelt, winning only six out of 48 states.

--Hoover invented his own sport (called 'Hooverball', naturally) to keep fit while in the White House. The game was a combination of volleyball and tennis, and he played it every morning. 

--The character played by James Cagney in the 1949 film "White Heat" was unofficially inspired by Hoover, who suffered from severe headaches and often pretended to be a gangster. He daydreamed about committing daring robberies, and enjoyed indiscriminately spraying machine gun fire while wandering the White House grounds. In fact, the movie made use of Hoover's famous catch-phrase, "Top of the world, Ma!", which he would shout into his wife's face every night before going to bed.

#30 Calvin Coolidge

1923--1929

--Coolidge gained a national reputation as the Governor of Massachusetts during the Boston Police Strike of 1919, in which he overruled the mayor of Boston and called in the national guard to stifle the rioting in that city. Coolidge then publicly rebuked the leader of the American Federation of Labor, an act that thrilled many who were fearful of organized labor, which was at the time considered a potential harbinger of communism (this was in the midst of the first Red Scare).

--He was elected as the 29th vice president in 1920 and succeeded to the presidency upon the sudden death of Warren G. Harding in 1923. Coolidge, who was vacationing at his father's home at the time of Harding's death, was sworn into office by his father, who was a justice of the peace and a notary public.

--Although Coolidge was known to be a skilled and effective public speaker, in private he was a man of few words and was therefore commonly referred to as "Silent Cal." A possibly apocryphal story has it that Dorothy Parker, seated next to him at a dinner, said to him, "Mr. Coolidge, I've made a bet against a fellow who said it was impossible to get more than two words out of you." His reply: "You lose."

--Coolidge's inauguration was the first presidential inauguration broadcast on radio. On August 11, 1924, Lee De Forest filmed Coolidge on the White House lawn with DeForest's Phonofilm sound-on-film process, thus becoming the first president to appear in a sound film.

--Curiously, Coolidge smelled powerfully of Cheerios, even though that breakfast cereal would not debut until 1941, eight years after his death.

#29 Warren G Harding

1921--1923

--Harding was the first U.S. president to ride an automobile to his inauguration.

--He most likely died of a heart attack, barely three years into his presidency, while on a trip through the western U.S. and Canada (Harding was at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco when he passed away).

--His brief administration is chiefly remembered for the Teapot Dome Scandal, a messy tale of bribery, fraud, and federal oil reserves.

 

--Harding once lost an entire set of White House china in one hand of poker.

--Warren Harding was rumored to have had several extramarital affairs, one of which, as confirmed in 2015 through DNA testing, resulted in an illegitimate daughter.

--The G stands for Gamaliel...yes, Harding was actually a Noldor Elf (also known as Golodhrim or 'Deep Elves') who left the Undying Lands of Valinor to follow Feanor in his quest for vengeance against Melkor the Enemy. It is unclear how Harding managed to escape the Valar's Prophecy of the North, which pronounced the doom of the Noldor exiles, and somehow survived thousands of years past the Fourth Age of Man.

#28 Woodrow Wilson

1913--1921

--Wilson is one of only three presidents to be widowed while in office (Tyler, Wilson, and Andrew Jackson--though Jackson's wife died while he was still formally president-elect). He married Edith Galt, a descendant of Pocahontas, a year after the death of his first wife. Galt has been labeled "the Secret President" and "the first woman to run the government" for the role she played when Wilson suffered prolonged and disabling illness after a serious stroke in October 1919. Some even refer to her as "the first female president of the United States." 

--Wilson was the first person identified with the south to be elected president since Zachary Taylor and the first southerner in the White House since Andrew Johnson left in 1868. He was the first president to deliver his State of the Union address before Congress personally since John Adams in 1799. Wilson was also the first Democrat elected to the presidency since Grover Cleveland in 1892 and only the second Democrat in the White House since the Civil War.

--He was an early automobile enthusiast, and a big baseball fan (Wilson was the first president to throw out a ball at a World Series game). As president, Wilson took to playing golf, although he played with more enthusiasm than skill. Wilson holds the record of all the presidents for the most rounds of golf, over 1,000, or almost one every other day. During the winter, the Secret Service would paint golf balls with black paint so Wilson could hit them around in the snow on the White House lawn.

--Every time he traveled north of the Mason-Dixon line, Wilson was hounded by a pack of spectral wolves.

#27 William Howard Taft

1909--1913

--Teddy Roosevelt appointed William Howard Taft to be his Secretary of War in 1904, and for a while Taft also served as Acting Secretary of State. When Roosevelt was away from Washington for an extended time, Taft was, in effect, a kind of "acting president".

When Roosevelt decided not to run for reelection in 1908 he had to convince Taft to run for president, and Roosevelt's backing did much to win Taft the presidency.

--In his reelection bid in1912, Taft won the mere eight electoral votes of Utah and Vermont, making his the single worst defeat in American history for an incumbent president seeking reelection; he finished not even second, but third, behind both Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt (who was then running on the Progressive, or "Bull Moose", ticket).

--On June 30, 1921, following the death of Chief Justice Edward Douglass White, President Warren G. Harding nominated Taft to take his place. For a man who had once remarked that "there is nothing I would have loved more than being chief justice of the United States" the nomination to oversee the highest court in the land was like a dream come true. He became the only president to serve as chief justice, and thus the only former president to swear in subsequent presidents, giving the oath of office to both Calvin Coolidge (in 1925) and Herbert Hoover (in 1929).

--Weighing over 300 pounds on average, Taft was the heaviest U.S. president ever elected, and to date the last president to have sported facial hair. He lost approximately 80 lbs within a year of leaving office, due to successful experimental surgery to remove his secret, abdominally-conjoined twin, Reginald Phineas Taft.