Who was really the first president of the United States?

George Washington is correctly regarded as the first President of the United States, inaugurated in 1789 as the first person to hold the office created by the Constitution, an executive with real national authority. He is the answer on every legitimate list, and the one that matters.

The trivia-night gotcha invokes John Hanson, who in 1781 became the first person to serve a full term as President of the United States in Congress Assembled, under the earlier Articles of Confederation. That title sounds identical but the job was not: it was essentially a presiding officer of Congress, a chairman with little executive power, not a head of state or government in the modern sense, and several men held it before the Constitution replaced the Articles. Calling Hanson the real first president is a fun bar-bet technicality, but it conflates two fundamentally different offices that happen to share a word. The presidency as an institution, the office Washington's successors have held ever since, began with Washington under the Constitution in 1789. So the honest answer: Washington was the first President of the United States; Hanson held a different, much weaker office with a confusingly similar name, and the people pushing him as the true first president are trading on that confusion.