The Worst Wing with Nicole Hemmer and Kevin Schultz (Preview)

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Guy Sucked – The Worst Wing with Nicole Hemmer and Kevin Schultz (Preview)
Release Date: November 6, 2025
Host: Dr. Claire Aubin
Guests: Professor Kevin Schultz and Professor Nicole Hemmer

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Episode Overview

This lively, live-recorded episode of This Guy Sucked introduces the special game show format, “The Worst Wing.” Host Claire Aubin invites two prominent political historians—Kevin Schultz and Nicole Hemmer—to each pick and defend their choice for the absolute worst U.S. president. Through a mix of humor and sharp historical insight, the panel dives deep into presidential failures, historical context, and the continued impact of lousy leadership.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Show Introduction & Format

• Claire welcomes the audience to the first-ever live recording and explains the show's satirical mission: “We prove it’s never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead.” (01:17)
• The structure for the evening: each guest filibusters for 10 minutes about why their chosen president is “the worst,” and Claire awards arbitrary points based on “vibes.”
• Claire admits a wicked pleasure in moderating “two very fancy political historians” in a contest of presidential awfulness: “Much like many presidents, I was given power and immediately abused it.” (03:49)
• Nicole is delighted to join: “We get to talk about presidents and we get to rag on presidents for a full hour. I’m 100% in.” (02:55)

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2. Kevin Schultz’s “Filibuster” Against Andrew Johnson (17th President)

Start: 05:42
Key Quote:
“This country is for white men and by God, as long as I’m president, it shall be a government for white men.” (05:46)

Kevin’s Case Against Johnson

• Immediate Context & Presidency

  • Johnson came to power after Lincoln’s assassination.
  • He allowed the hard-fought Civil War victory to be squandered by letting Southern elites regain power (05:46–07:18).
  • “All the awful presidents that came after him could do the kinds of things that they did… Which continue[d] when it was almost open for equality. Andrew Johnson, thanks so much for that.” (06:09)

• Personal Flaws and Incompetence

  • Deeply insecure and obsessed with gaining respect from wealthy Southern planters (08:06).
  • Notoriously belligerent, prone to drunkenness and outbursts (08:06–08:45):
  • “He had a terrible personality as well… He famously got so drunk at the inauguration of 1865 when he was sworn in as Vice President… that it became national news. That is very, very drunk.” (08:20)

• Obstruction of Racial Justice

  • Powerfully opposed to the Freedmen’s Bureau, vetoed its activities, and replaced its leaders to undermine Reconstruction (11:15).
  • “Andrew Johnson fought against the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau… And when that was overruled by the Congress, he ended up purging all the leaders and putting all of his own personal people in charge so that they could use that to do all sorts of terrible things.” (11:19)
  • Trivialized black aspirations: revoked “40 acres and a mule” by returning land to former enslavers, forcing freed people off reclaimed land (13:00–14:30).

• Authoritarian & Paranoid Tendencies

  • Demanded loyalty oaths from his cabinet, making him the first president to be impeached (09:35).
  • Engaged in public self-aggrandizement:
    • “He spent his time on George Washington’s birthday celebration, giving a speech that lasted an hour where he mentioned George Washington’s name only a handful of times, but he mentioned his own name 200 times.” (12:03)
  • Paranoid accusations of plots against him led supporters to attack political opponents (12:13).

• Destruction of Reconstruction’s Promise

  • Granted amnesty to Southern elites who demonstrated groveling fealty; disenfranchised newly freed Black people by enabling “Black Codes” in Southern states—a form of “slavery by another name.” (14:00–15:25)
  • “After four years of bloodshed in the name of slavery because of what Andrew Johnson did, we did not have racial equality in the United States. When there was a small sliver of hope that it could come about, and whatever hope there would be, Andrew Johnson pulled the rug out. And we’ve been living with the consequences ever since.” (15:17)

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3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Game Show Format:
  • Claire, playfully acknowledging her own authority:
    • “Much like many presidents, I was given power and immediately abused it.” (03:49)
• On Johnson’s Racism:
  • Kevin (quoting Johnson):
    • “This country is for white men and by God, as long as I'm president, it shall be a government for white men.” (05:46)
• On Presidential Ego:
  • Kevin:
    • “He spent his time on George Washington’s birthday … giving a speech that lasted an hour where he mentioned George Washington’s name only a handful of times, but he mentioned his own name 200 times.” (12:03)
• Summing Up:
  • Claire, post-filibuster:
    • “That guy sucks. ... And he sucks. He sucks so much.” (15:32)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:05 – Claire welcomes audience to the first live episode, introduces game format.
• 02:18 – Kevin is introduced as both esteemed historian and frequent guest.
• 02:55 – Nicole expresses why she’s delighted to participate.
• 05:42 – Kevin begins his filibuster on Andrew Johnson.
• 05:46 – Kevin quotes Andrew Johnson’s infamous racist declaration.
• 09:35 – Kevin details Johnson’s impeachment and authoritarian style.
• 11:15 – Discussion of Johnson sabotaging the Freedmen’s Bureau.
• 12:03 – The egotistical George Washington’s Birthday speech.
• 13:00–15:25 – Johnson’s postwar amnesty, enablement of Black Codes, and destruction of Reconstruction’s promise.
• 15:25 – Claire enthusiastically wraps up Kevin’s filibuster.

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Episode Tone & Style

The episode is fast-paced and irreverent, blending dark humor with rigorous historical critique. Claire’s sarcastic asides and the guests’ scholarly candor make for both an educational and entertaining listen. The spirit is fundamentally critical, aiming to expose and ridicule historical failures with both expertise and wit.

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For More

To hear Nicole Hemmer’s presidential pick and the rest of the “Worst Wing” showdown, listeners are encouraged to subscribe to the show’s Patreon.

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Summary prepared for those seeking an insightful and sharp-witted breakdown of This Guy Sucked’s live “Worst Wing” special, with a focus on the case against Andrew Johnson as the worst U.S. president—all before the scoring and the show’s second round.

Transcript

[Claire Aubin]

Hi there, it's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're listening to the free preview of one of our Patreon episodes. We switch off every week between free and Patreon exclusive episodes. So if you'd like to hear the rest of this conversation, head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join our honorary haters club. A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description.

[Kevin Schultz]

Welcome to the stage. This Guy sucked Live.

[Claire Aubin]

Welcome everybody, to the very first live edition. Oh shit, I'm dropping my stuff already. Shout out to the people at home listening this and not seeing this happen.

[Kevin Schultz]

Wait, we're allowed to cuss?

[Claire Aubin]

Absolutely. Welcome to the very first live edition of this Guy Suck. The show where we prove it's never too late to have haters and you'd can't libel the dead. I am your host, Orion in Chief Claire Aubin, and I am so incredibly excited to bring you the premier and probably only episode of our presidential game show, the Worst Wing. I am joined by two unbelievably cool and exciting and smart and well dressed guests, both of whom are very fancy political historians. So? So I am very confused about why they agreed to do this. First up is Professor Kevin Schultz. He's a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago and an author of the brand new book why Everyone Hates White Liberals, including white liberals. And a returning guest of the pod. Go check out his Spiro Agnew episode. Kevin, are you aware that you are the first person to be on the show twice?

[Kevin Schultz]

I'm so honored. Oh my goodness, so exciting. Thank you.

[Claire Aubin]

I mean, kind of a dubious honor because I'm subjected you to this, but yeah. We also have the brilliant Nicole Hemmer, who is a professor at Vanderbilt University and the director of the Carolyn T. And Robert M. Rogers center for the American Presidency. If her voice sounds familiar to those listening at home or in the audience, she's also got a podcast. Hers is called this Day. It's by Radiotopia and it's much more serious than this one. Nicole, why on earth would you subject yourself to this?

[Nicole Hemmer]

I mean, we get to talk about presidents and we get to rag on presidents for a full hour. I'm 100% in.

[Kevin Schultz]

Perfect.

[Claire Aubin]

Thank you both so much for agreeing to do this and also for flying here for it.

[Nicole Hemmer]

And boy, are my arms tired.

[Claire Aubin]

Despite a government shutdown on dad jokes immediately, the format for the night is fairly simple. I have invented a game show. You've each picked a president that you think is the absolute worst. You also both know, theoretically a lot about other presidents. Over the course of the next 50 minutes, we are going to talk about the guys that you picked and we're going to play some bad president themed games and at the end everyone will be sad. But good thing you can go buy drinks at the bar to drown those fears. Anyways, this is going to be a points based thing where whoever ends up with the most points wins so that we don't have to decide which one of your presidents is worse than the other because they are all bad in different overlapping ways, which is something we all agreed on backstage. We're doing points because that feels slightly better to me than deciding that one of you chose a worse president. The most fun part about this for me is that I don't even know that much presidential history. So it's really just kind of like a sadistic thing that I'm making you two do. Much like many presidents, I was given power and immediately abused it. So should we play some games?

Let's do it.

Let's go back, back. All right, the first game of the night is called the filibuster. Basically you each get 10 minutes. We will cut you off to tell me and the audience everything they need to know about your guy and why he was the absolute worst. Unlike a normal filibuster, we, meaning me and the other guests and possibly the audience, I don't know, haven't really thought that far ahead, can ask follow up questions. At the end of this, I will award one of you three points and one of you five points in relation to an utterly arbitrary vibes based system that I'll figure out as we go. Shout out to Amanda McLaughlin for being our scorekeeper for the night. Up for front, the first filibuster filibusterer is the one and only Kevin Schultz, who has told me I'm supposed to call him Professor Kevin Michael Schultz the whole night. And he's here to talk about our. Nope, wrong direction. 17th President. Take it away. Oh, wrong. One day I will press this. Therehere we go. 17th president. Take it away, Kevin.

[Kevin Schultz]

Okay, on the way over, I was looking up actual quotes and things that I can use.

[Claire Aubin]

Okay.

[Kevin Schultz]

And I did it on a janky back of an envelope, literally speaking. So I want to start with a quote to start us off on why Andrew Johnson is the worst president. So this is just going to kick us off with a little light stuff here. This country is for white men and by God, as long as I'm president, it shall be a government who. For white men. So we can go from there, right? Do I win already? Is that it? So Andrew Johnson was the 17th president of the United States. And for those who don't know, he was the guy who became president after Abraham Lincoln got shot and died. He was the vice president at the time. And he was the one who famously allowed the civil war, four years of bloody army awful killing. 600,000 people died in the Civil War, all to end slavery and to create a more just country. Then Andrew Johnson let it all slip away. He was, I think, because of some of the things that he did, which was basically allow the white Southern aristocracy to go back into power. All the awful presidents that came after him could do the kinds of things that they did. For instance, sort of, let's just say, Richard Nixon's Southern strategy trying to undermine the opposition here, which is premised on racial subjugation of black people. Where does this continue when it was almost open for equality? Andrew Johnson, thanks so much for that. Okay, a couple things. Obviously, he was openly racist. I already started off with a quote that set that up for us. He also used his own personal insecurities to make the battle of the Civil War a war that the north actually won. Or as I like to call the north, the United States of America, actually won over not the south, but the Confederate States of America, to bring those states back into the United States of America. And that was a war that the north won. But the south ended up with all the spoils of victory in the long term. And that was because of Andrew Johnson. Okay, he was born poor. That's fine. I've got no beef with that. He never went to school.

[Claire Aubin]

Crazy thing for you to have that.

[Kevin Schultz]

I've got no beef with that poor kid. But what he did was he was always super insecure about the Southern wealthy planter elites who would literally ride around on horses, head high above him, looking down on him. And he thought those were the people that you needed to impress in order to make your way in the world. So he spent his whole career trying to kiss the ass, trying to of the rich white Southerners. He had a terrible personality as well, partly because he was so insecure about this. He obviously used swear words all the time. He was a terrible drunkard who went around and just sort of picked fights all the time. He famously got so drunk at the inauguration of 1865 when he was sworn in as Vice President of the United States, that it became national news. That is very, very drunk. And he had no curiosity at all. No curiosity about how the world worked, about what other people's lives might be like. All he wanted to do was empower himself and impress that Southern white aristocracy. So anybody that got in his way, he picked a fight, and all he wanted to do was fight. Abraham Lincoln, we all know, is famous for his band of brothers attitude, his cabinet of dissent, bringing together all these factions in the United States to try and forge together to create a nation. Andrew Johnson comes in, and that is not at all what he wants to do. He wants to destroy the country and make sure that everybody pays homage to him. One of my favorite things that happened, a horrible thing, but it maybe hits a little close to home, is he made his cabinet swear loyalty oaths to him. And if you did not want to swear a loyalty oath to the President of the United States, he summarily fired you. The problem was that was illegal. So he is the first president to ever be impeached. Yet another reason to hate this guy. He was the first president to be impeached. He barely, barely escaped by one vote, his impeachment vote, or else he would have lost his job. And that was because there was no vice president at the time, because he had just become president after Abraham Lincoln was shot. So people were too nervous about what would happen in. If he actually got kicked out. The other thing I'm learning. What's that?

[Claire Aubin]

I'm learning.

[Kevin Schultz]

Oh, you're learning. All right. Two more things, and then I'll cede my time.

[Claire Aubin]

You have five minutes and 18 seconds left.

[Kevin Schultz]

Okay, this is great. This is great.

[Claire Aubin]

Now he's going to drag it out.

Because he only has two minutes of content.

[Kevin Schultz]

After the Civil War, they created a Freedman's Bureau, which was a government agency that helped the previously enslaved black population get things like an education, learn how to read, learn how to vote, health care. Things like this was under the operation of the Freedmen's Bureau, which was run by a guy named OO Howard, who is the namesake of Howard University. You might have heard of Howard University in Washington, D.C. where my dad went to dental school.

[Claire Aubin]

I don't know if you knew, and that's why I know about Howard University.

[Kevin Schultz]

There you go. Exactly.

[Claire Aubin]

That's their main thing.

[Kevin Schultz]

Well, Andrew Johnson fought against the creation of the Freedmen's Bureau. When that was over, he vetoed it. And when that was overruled by the Congress, he ended up purging all the leaders and putting all of his own personal people in charge so that they could use that to do all sorts of terrible Things so that the government administrator. This is really sounding very familiar, isn't it? So that the federal government would use the powers to. To do not great things. He spent his time on George Washington's birthday celebration, giving a speech that lasted an hour where he mentioned George Washington's name only a handful of times, but he mentioned his own name 200 times.

[Claire Aubin]

Oh my God, it's the same guy. They're all the same guy.

[Kevin Schultz]

Oh, wait. Somebody said, is there anybody in politics that you don't like? And he said, I have an enemies.

[Claire Aubin]

Listen, shut up.

[Kevin Schultz]

And he went on to name Thaddeus Sherman and Charles Sumner, two radical Republicans who were pushing for black rights at the time. And he said, they have a dastardly plot out to kill me. Which wasn't true so far as I know. But lo and behold, all of a sudden, his supporters went after Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens for their supposed, and as far as I can tell, make believe assassination attempts.

[Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Kevin Schultz]

But here's the worst thing that I could say about Andrew Johnson. When the Civil War ended, all of a sudden, the Union army, the United States army, as I like to call it, came through the South. And all the planter class, the rich white slaveholders, they fled or they were imprisoned, or they had fought and just went away. And the formerly enslaved people followed the Union soldiers and they freed themselves. As us historians like to say, they weren't freed, but they said, no way, I'm out of here. And they got behind the Union lines and freed themselves. Then some of those formerly enslaved people, now free people, now going to freedmen schools, now going to freedmen hospitals to get health care. They started to work the land that had been places where they were enslaved. They started to take over the land. They started. There was this promise that Spike Lee reminded us of called 40 acres and a mule. We should give all the formerly enslaved people 40 acres and a mule was the promise. And where is this land gonna come from all of those huge plantations that were owned by the planter class? Well, when Andrew Johnson was president, instead of allowing that to happen, he decided that he was gonna offer amnesty to the rich white Southerners who he had looked up to as a boy. But in order to get amnesty and get your land back, you had to travel to Washington D.C. and plead personally to the President. And once he thought that you were worthy and you sucked up enough, then he would give you amnesty. There was a line of suitors around the White House waiting to get all their land back. And guess what? They all showed up they all kissed the ring. They got their land back. Those formerly enslaved people were legally tossed off the land. And shortly thereafter, these Southern states get invited back into the United States of America, and they all pass what are called black codes, which some historians call slavery by another name. These were laws put in place that kept black people from basically being free, from being allowed to transport themselves, from being allowed to own land. So after four years of bloodshed in the name of slavery because of what Andrew Johnson did, we did not have racial equality in the United States. When there was a small sliver of hope that it could come about, and whatever hope there would be, Andrew Johnson pulled the rug out. And we've been living with the consequences ever since.

[Claire Aubin]

That was very good. That was a very good filibuster. That guy sucks. That.

[Kevin Schultz]

That guy sucks.

[Claire Aubin]

And he sucks. He sucks so much. And you came in 22nd with 20 seconds to spare. Well done.

[Kevin Schultz]

My third point.

[Claire Aubin]

I will. I do like that you added the reason. One of the reasons he's a bad person is that he switches swears a lot. And if that's the case, I'm fucked. Let me just say know thyself.

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