President Donald Trump posted a graphic on Truth Social declaring himself "The Greatest" president in American history, placing his name in a standalone category above every one of his predecessors while sorting several former Democratic presidents into a "Failures" tier alongside his post on Thursday.

The chart divides presidents into six tiers, ranging from "The Greatest" down to "Failures," with Trump alone occupying the top category. Directly beneath him, in the "Great" tier, sit Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. A "Near Great" tier includes Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, John Adams and James Polk.

At the bottom of the chart, Trump's "Failures" tier lists Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren Harding and Jimmy Carter. An "Average" category includes Bill Clinton, John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, Rutherford Hayes, James Madison, Martin Van Buren, William Taft, Chester Arthur, William McKinley, Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover and Benjamin Harrison, while John Tyler, Calvin Coolidge, Millard Fillmore, Zachary Taylor, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce make up a "Below Average" tier.

The graphic appears to be a modified version of a ranking first published by LIFE magazine in 1948, based on a survey historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. conducted among 55 experts in American history at the time.

Trump's version largely preserves the original tiers and their occupants but inserts his own name at the top and adds Biden, Obama and Carter to the "Failures" category, a group that did not exist in that form in the 1948 survey, which could not have included any of the three given the era it covered.

The chart also leaves out nearly a dozen presidents entirely, including Ronald Reagan, both Presidents Bush, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman, whose omission from the original 1948 survey reflected the fact that he was still in office at the time it was conducted. William Henry Harrison and James Garfield, both of whom died shortly after taking office, are similarly absent.

Trump shared the ranking alongside a CNN clip highlighting polling that showed strong support for him among Republican voters. The post drew swift commentary from several media outlets, with some noting the irony of a president whose approval ratings have hovered in the mid-30s placing himself above Lincoln and Washington, and others pointing out that Trump has previously offered more favourable assessments of some of the excluded presidents, at one point describing Reagan as "high quality" and Lyndon Johnson as a "tough cookie" in separate remarks.

The post adds to a pattern of Trump using tiered rankings and comparative graphics on Truth Social to promote his standing while drawing contrasts with political rivals, a format he has used repeatedly through his second term.

The White House had not issued a follow-up statement elaborating on the criteria behind the rankings as of the time of this report.