Trump vs Nero

I'm going with Trump is worse because he personally affects me, whereas I don't have to deal with Nero.

Trump is objectively the best modern President, the only one who won't start a war. He even pulled troops out of South Korea who had been there since the 1950's.

Nero is far worse and committed so many atrocities than Trump could ever do.

At least I can use Nero for CD burning.

Pretty hard to determine who is "worse" when you're comparing "leadership" from such a drastically different era. There were no institutional checks on Roman emperors. They were dictators with absolute power. If Trump had absolute power he could very well plumb the depths of Nero. We've seen how he's sought to use the power of the state to attack his political enemies (sought DoJ prosecution of Clinton and Comey, tried hard to raise postal rates to hurt Bezos) and was only constrained because our system of government isn't set up that way.

That said, my reading of history is that Nero might have gotten an unfair rap because of how relentlessly he persecuted and crucified Christians. Many of the scholars that wrote about his evils were Christian historians predisposed to demonize him, especially for his sexual exploits as that seems to be a natural Christian obsession. His political enemies loved to portray him as a sexual degenerate. That makes it hard to know how seriously to take accusations from enemies with an axe to grind.

Not to say Nero wasn't a cruel tyrant by modern standards, in all likelihood he was, in particular to those he viewed as enemies. During his reign Christians were still viewed as a threat to the empire and the established order; his efficient brutality in dealing with a perceived threat to Rome would have been a popular establishment sentiment of the time.

But there are reasons to believe he wasn't all bad. Many rich Roman slave holders would abandon their sick to public work and hope that someone would save their lives; only to recover them if they survived. Nero made it law that abandoned slaves were free. He granted slaves the right to file civil complaints in court against their masters, which shocked the establishment at the time. He was also a champion of the poor, he cut their taxes and cracked down on the corruption of tax collectors that fleeced them. He was a pretty competent administrator, IMO much more so than Trump.