PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — At 100 years ancient, Jimmy Carter was able to fulfill his wish of voting for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris against Republican Donald Trump in November. His death means flags at the White House will be at half-staff when Trump regains the presidency on January 20.
Completely different in their political beliefs and personal lives, in their actions as president and after leaving office, Carter and Trump will be intertwined once again as the memory and legacy of one endures while the other for the second time is introduced into office. It will be another example of how the two continue to overlap in often contradictory ways, even though their terms in office were nearly 40 years apart.
Trump praised Carter for harsh criticism during the 2024 campaign and repeatedly mocked him to fire up his supporters. He called President Joe Biden “the worst” but said he made Carter look “brilliant” in comparison. He even delivered the saying on Carter’s 100th birthday in October.
The president-elect also promised to operate his second term to undo some of Carter’s outstanding achievements. He wants to roll back environmental protections, potentially break a 1977 treaty handing control of the Panama Canal back to his home country and dismantle the federal Department of Education, which Carter co-founded in 1979.
Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday, Trump once again expressed outrage at Carter’s role in handing control of the canal to Panama, saying it was “a disgrace what’s happening.” is” and “Jimmy Carter gave in.” it to them for a dollar.” About Panama, which operates the canal, he added: “They laugh at us because they think we’re stupid.” Well, we’re not stupid anymore .”
Those comments came the day Carter’s remains were flown to Washington, where he will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol. Asked whether criticism of Carter was appropriate, Trump replied: “I liked him as a man.” I didn’t agree with his policies. He thought giving away the Panama Canal would be a good thing.
“I didn’t want to mention the Panama Canal because of Jimmy Carter’s death,” he added, although he had initially mentioned it unprompted.
Still, Trump plans to attend Carter’s funeral, and his statement marking the former president’s death was gracious. He wrote: “The challenges Jimmy faced as president came at a crucial time for our country, and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans. For that we all owe him a great debt of gratitude.”
Trump also called Carter “a good man” who was “very consequential, much more so than most presidents, after he left the Oval Office.”
“Although I strongly disagreed with him philosophically and politically, I also realized that he truly loved and respected our country and everything it stands for,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media network. “He worked hard to make America a better country,” and I give him my highest respect for that.”
Amber Roessner, a professor and media historian at the University of Tennessee, said that for candidate Trump, “Carter has become the perfect metaphor to criticize the Biden administration” given Democrats’ parallel battles over inflation and unrest in the Middle East. But she said Carter and Trump shared a similar political ethos as outsiders who stoked populism and challenged and angered the political establishment.
Roessner, who met with Carter for an extensive interview in 2014, said both he and Trump had successfully presented themselves as real in an otherwise often flighty and transactional world of politics.
“Carter’s message has certainly been one of love and moral reform, while Trump has offered a more divisive kind of politics of hate,” she said. “Both fit the political moment.”
Carter, the 39th President, was an outspoken and devout Baptist who was married to the same woman for 77 years and taught Sunday school during his presidency and afterward. He gave Trump this advice in 2019: “Keep the peace, promote human rights and tell the truth.”
Trump, the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president, was married three times and was convicted of paying hush money to cover up an extramarital affair with a porn actor.
But as candidates and as presidents, Carter and Trump both knew how best to maximize media coverage and were both critical of the media, Roessner said, particularly of political reporters who viewed them as out of touch.
She pointed to a 1976 interview with Playboy magazine in which Carter found fault with the reporters who followed his campaign, saying, “The traveling press doesn’t care about any subject unless it’s about a mistake.” “…There’s no one in the back of this plane who would ask a problem question unless they thought they could trick me into saying something crazy.”
However, Carter never went nearly as far as Trump, who has branded the press the “enemy of the people,” dismissed factual reports he dislikes as “fake news,” and criticized journalists at his rallies so harshly that it drew thunderous boos from the audience.
During the 2016 election, Carter warned his party not to underestimate Trump’s appeal. Both men also defy all ideological labels and are distinguished by their willingness to speak to dictators and isolated nations.
In 2018, Carter offered to travel to North Korea on behalf of the Trump administration. The following year, Trump called Carter to talk about China. He later described what had been said as a “very good telephone conversation” and added that he had “always liked President Carter.”
However, things weren’t always genial.
In 2014, Trump incorrectly referred to the former president as “the late, great Jimmy Carter” at a conservative conference. While Trump was president, Carter suggested that an investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election “could show that Trump did not do this.” actually win,” even though the investigation never came close to substantiating this unsubstantiated claim.
Carter also criticized Trump for withholding U.S. funds to the World Health Organization during the coronavirus pandemic. Trump said during a G20 summit in 2019 that Carter was nice but “a terrible president.”
Lindsay Chervinksy, a presidential historian and executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library in Mount Vernon, Virginia, said Trump’s comments after Carter’s death were “what you do when a president dies and that this is considered the best form.” , but that the President-Elect’s more derogatory campaign comments about Carter were probably more in line with his true thoughts.
In fact, Trump has already expressed his irritation at Biden keeping flags at half-staff in Carter’s honor at his inauguration, posting that “the Democrats are all ‘upset’ about this.”
“No one wants to see this, and no American can be happy about it,” he wrote.
Regardless of what transpired after the presidency, by the time he left the White House in 1981, Carter’s impoverished reputation appeared to have been frozen for Trump, who often uses that decade of his own rise as a touchstone.
In 2020, Trump posted on social media that he had “selected 52 Iranian sites as targets” should Iran retaliate for the targeted killing of General Qassem Soleimani. He said that number corresponded to the 52 American hostages taken by Iran during Carter’s term.
“A lot of what Trump says is influenced by the 1980s,” Chervinksy said. “In this era, Carter was synonymous with what it meant to be a failed, single-term president.”
Carter significantly rehabilitated his political image after his presidency. After his landslide re-election defeat, Carter returned to Georgia, where he and his wife Rosalynn founded the Carter Center in 1982. He then spent decades advocating for democracy, resolving international conflicts and promoting public health worldwide. The couple also built homes with Habitat for Humanity.
The former president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Trump never accepted his loss to Biden in 2020 and shied away from typical post-presidency efforts to become an elder statesman and burnish his legacy with novel ventures. Instead, he vowed vengeance against political enemies and launched a political comeback that made him the first president since Grover Cleveland in 1893 to retake the White House without consequence.
Carter entered hospice care in February 2023. He said his goal was “just to try to vote for Kamala Harris,” his grandson Jason Carter told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in August.
The former president cast his vote for Harris by mail on October 16. He died two months and two weeks later.
