Yet the bigger worry for some historians is not the revelations about Harding’s womanizing but the reassessments of his lamentable presidential record that have accompanied them. In a piece Thursday for The Washington Post, James B. Robenalt argued that Harding was actually “a good president.” Sure, his Cabinet was riddled with corruption, but its various scandals—most infamously, the Teapot Dome affair—never touched him directly, Robenalt said. He also credited Harding with putting the federal government on a budget for the first time and setting the conditions for the economic expansion of the Roaring Twenties (which culminated rather disastrously with the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression). Harding, according to Robenalt, was also not that bad on race relations, having voiced support for an anti-lynching law.

That’s all hogwash, said Kevin Kruse, a historian at Princeton University. In 1920, Harding was a small-town newspaper publisher who had served a single term in the Senate when he was handpicked by Republican Party bosses largely because he was inoffensive and could deliver his home state of Ohio for the GOP. In the aftermath of the First World War and the tumultuous end to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, voters wanted the “return to normalcy” that Harding promised. And the easy-going Ohioan was the opposite of Wilson, an idealistic academic whose push for U.S. participation in a League of Nations was rejected by the Senate and the public. In a series of tweets on Thursday, Kruse pointed out that the most damning assessment of Harding’s qualifications for the presidency came not from historians or partisans but from the man himself, who admitted repeatedly to reporters that he was in over his head. (“A man of limited talents,” Harding once said of himself.)

“He felt woefully under-qualified for the job, and that set in motion a chain of events that set him up to be one of the worst presidencies in history,” Kruse elaborated to me. “He was nervous about it, so he surrounded himself with old friends from his hometown, who themselves were unqualified for the jobs they held and many of them corrupt.” Harding’s pick to head the veterans bureau just a few years after World War I, for example, was a man he’d met while vacationing and who later engaged in a “massive swindle.” And as fans of HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” will recall, Harding’s attorney general, Harry Daugherty, was running a criminal operation that made him rich.

Even if Harding was not directly implicated in the scandals, he inarguably took a hands-off approach to governance and was responsible for the men he chose to run the country. “We judge an administration by the president,” Kruse said. “Who do they appoint to put in positions of power? And Harding’s choices across the board were perhaps the worst in American history.” As for Robenalt’s argument that Harding had a solid record on race relations, Kruse and Richardson countered that this was greatly overstated. While voicing nominal support for anti-lynching legislation, Kruse said, he also came out in favor of eugenics and in opposition to “social equality”—a code phrase at the time for interracial marriage.