“When indecision is your superpower.”

Yes, we’re talking about James Buchanan again. No, it’s not a typo. The man’s presidency was such a historic mess, it deserves an encore. Think of May 4 as the trailer — today we screen the full disaster film. When a president manages to not act while the nation splinters, you don’t just mention it once and move on. You stop, you shake your head, and you ask how the guy kept showing up for work like everything was fine. Spoiler: it wasn’t.

If leadership is about rising to meet the moment, James Buchanan tripped on the moment and blamed the rug. Widely regarded by historians as the most useless president in U.S. history, Buchanan watched the nation fall apart like a bad Jenga tower — and did virtually nothing to stop it.

During Buchanan’s presidency, the nation was already teetering on the edge of civil war. Slavery was tearing the country in two, and tensions between North and South were white-hot. Buchanan? He chose neutrality. Not in a wise, balanced way — more like a deer caught in the headlights while the Constitution was actively being rewritten in front of him.

He supported the Dred Scott decision, which ruled that African Americans weren’t citizens and that Congress had no right to ban slavery in the territories (Finkelman, 2011). Rather than calm tensions, the ruling inflamed them, and Buchanan applauded it — essentially throwing gasoline on a fire and calling it bipartisanship.

Then came the secession crisis. As Southern states began to secede following Lincoln’s election in 1860, Buchanan declared they had no constitutional right to leave the Union — but also insisted the federal government had no constitutional power to stop them. That’s right. He acknowledged the problem, then did absolutely nothing about it.

By the time he left office in March 1861, seven states had seceded, and the country was in freefall. He handed the flaming bag of democracy to Abraham Lincoln and walked away like it wasn’t his fault — because technically, he hadn’t done anything. And that was precisely the problem.

Historians often rank Buchanan as the worst president, and for good reason: he wasn’t corrupt, or evil, or wildly unqualified — just utterly passive in the face of national disaster. If doing nothing were a presidential sport, Buchanan would be its undefeated champion.