Everyone loves to argue about the dumbest president, but the funniest part is that Warren Harding already ended the debate himself. He literally said "I am not fit for this office and should never have been here." Most politicians would rather walk into the sea than admit that. Harding just said it out loud and went back to his card game. And the record backs him up hard. He stuffed his cabinet with his poker buddies, the so called Ohio Gang, and then let them treat the federal government like their personal piggy bank. His Interior Secretary took cash and cattle to secretly hand off government oil reserves to rich friends. That is the Teapot Dome scandal, and the man actually went to prison for it. His Veterans Bureau chief looted money meant for wounded WWI soldiers. Two of his associates killed themselves as the investigators closed in. The kicker is that Harding saw it coming. He said his enemies never kept him up at night, it was his friends, because he could not say no to anyone. He even joked it was a good thing he wasn't a woman, because he'd never be able to say no and would always be pregnant. Self awareness was somehow the one thing he had plenty of. Even his big talent was fake. He gave these grand flowery speeches, and the critic H.L. Mencken said Harding's writing "reminds me of a string of wet sponges, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it." That might be the meanest and most accurate review any president has ever received. He died in office in 1923 with the scandals still coming apart at the seams, and decades later a DNA test confirmed what people whispered for years, that he'd fathered a child with a much younger woman while he was in the White House. Historians have parked him at the bottom of the rankings for a hundred straight years. And the wild part is, Harding would probably just shrug and agree with them.