PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Residing to 100 let Jimmy Carter fulfill his want to vote for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in opposition to Republican Donald Trump in November. His loss of life means flags on the White Home can be at half-staff when Trump regains the presidency on Jan. 20.
Starkly totally different of their political opinions and private lives, of their actions as president and after leaving workplace, Carter and Trump will once more be intertwined because the reminiscence and legacy of 1 linger whereas the opposite is inaugurated for a second time. It’ll be one other instance of how the 2 have continued to overlap in usually contradictory methods, despite the fact that their phrases had been separated by practically 40 years.
Trump singled out Carter for intense criticism throughout the 2024 marketing campaign, repeatedly mocking him to fireside up supporters. He known as President Joe Biden “the worst” however mentioned he made Carter look “brilliant” by comparability. He even delivered the road on Carter’s one centesimal birthday in October.
The president-elect additionally promised to make use of his second time period to undo a few of Carter’s signature accomplishments. He desires to roll again environmental protections, doubtlessly renege on a 1977 treaty ceding management of the Panama Canal again to its dwelling nation and dismantle the federal Division of Training that Carter helped create in 1979.
Talking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago membership in Palm Seaside, Florida, on Tuesday, Trump once more bristled at Carter’s function in transferring management of the canal to Panama, saying, it’s “a disgrace what took place” and “Jimmy Carter gave it to them for one dollar.” He added of Panama working the canal, “They laugh at us because they think we’re stupid. Well, we’re not stupid anymore.”
These feedback got here on the day Carter’s stays had been being flown to Washington, the place he’ll lie in state on the U.S. Capitol. Pressed on if criticism of Carter was acceptable as that was transpiring, Trump responded, “I liked him as a man. I disagreed with his policies. He thought giving away the Panama Canal was a good thing.”
“I didn’t want to bring up the Panama Canal because of Jimmy Carter’s death,” he added, despite the fact that he had first talked about it unprompted.
But Trump is planning to attend Carter’s funeral, and his assertion marking the previous president’s passing was gracious. He wrote: “The challenges Jimmy faced as President came at a pivotal 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 debt of gratitude.”
Trump additionally known as Carter “a good man” who was “very consequential, far more than most Presidents, after he left the Oval Office.”
“While I strongly disagreed with him philosophically and politically, I also realized that he truly loved and respected our Country, and all it stands for,” Trump wrote in a publish on his social media community. “He worked hard to make America a better place, and for that I give him my highest respect.”
Amber Roessner, a College of Tennessee professor and media historian, mentioned that, for candidate Trump, “Carter became the perfect metaphor with which to critique the Biden administration” given the parallel battles the Democrats confronted on inflation and unrest within the Center East. However she mentioned Carter and Trump share an analogous political ethos as outsiders who stoked populism and challenged and vexed the political institution.
Roessner, who sat down with Carter for an prolonged interview in 2014, mentioned each he and Trump efficiently introduced themselves as genuine in an usually in any other case flighty and transactional world of politics.
“Carter’s was certainly a message of love and moral reform while Trump has offered a more divisive kind of politics of hate,” she mentioned. “Both of them fit the political moment.”
Carter, the thirty ninth president, was an outspoken and religious Baptist who was married to the identical girl for 77 years and taught Sunday faculty whereas president and afterward. He provided this recommendation to Trump in 2019: “Keep the peace, promote human rights and tell the truth.”
Trump, the forty fifth and soon-to-be forty seventh president, has been married thrice and was convicted of creating hush cash funds to cowl up an extramarital affair with a porn actor.
But, as candidates and as presidents, Carter and Trump each knew how one can greatest maximize media protection and had been each crucial of the media, Roessner mentioned, particularly political reporters they seen as out of contact.
She pointed to a 1976 interview with Playboy journal during which Carter discovered fault with the reporters who adopted his marketing campaign, saying: “The traveling press have zero interest in any issue unless it’s a matter of making a mistake. … There’s nobody in the back of this plane who would ask an issue question unless he thought he could trick me into some crazy statement.”
Throughout the 2016 election, Carter cautioned his occasion about underestimating Trump’s enchantment. Each males additionally defy ideological labels, standing out for his or her willingness to speak to dictators and remoted nations.
In 2018, Carter provided to journey to North Korea on the Trump administration’s behalf. The next 12 months, Trump known as Carter to talk about China. He later described what was mentioned as a “very good telephone conversation” and added that he’d “always liked President Carter.”
Issues weren’t all the time cordial, although.
In 2014, Trump mistakenly referred to the previous president at a conservative convention as “the late, great Jimmy Carter.” Whereas Trump was president, Carter steered that an investigation into Russian affect within the 2016 presidential election would possibly “show that Trump didn’t actually win,” despite the fact that the investigation by no means got here near substantiating that baseless declare.
Carter additionally criticized Trump for withholding U.S. funds to the World Well being Group throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Trump mentioned throughout a G20 Summit in 2019 that Carter was good however “a terrible president.”
Lindsay Chervinksy, a presidential historian and govt director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon in Virginia, mentioned that Trump’s statements after Carter’s loss of life had been “what you do when a president dies and is considered to be best form” however that the president-elect’s extra derogatory marketing campaign feedback on Carter had been most likely nearer to his actual ideas.
Certainly, Trump has already expressed annoyance at Biden’s directing flags be at half-staff in Carter’s honor for his inauguration, posting that “The Democrats are all ‘giddy’” about it.
“Nobody wants to see this, and no American can be happy about it,” he wrote.
Regardless of what unfolded post-presidency, Carter’s deflated status when he left the White Home in 1981 appeared frozen for Trump, who usually makes use of that decade of his personal rise to fame as a touchstone.
In 2020, Trump posted on social media that he had “lined up 52 Iranian sites as targets” if Iran retaliated for the focused killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani. He mentioned that quantity represented the 52 American hostages taken by Iran when Carter was in workplace.
“Much of what Trump says is shaped by the 1980s,” Chervinksy mentioned. “In that era Carter was synonymous with what it meant to be a failed, one-term president.”
The previous president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Trump by no means accepted his defeat to Biden in 2020 and shunned the everyday post-presidency efforts to grow to be an elder statesman and burnish his legacy with new endeavors. As a substitute, he vowed retribution in opposition to political enemies and mounted a political comeback that made him the primary president since Grover Cleveland in 1893 to reclaim the White Home in nonconsecutive phrases.
Carter entered hospice care in February 2023. He mentioned his purpose was “only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,” his grandson, Jason Carter, advised The Atlanta Journal-Structure in August.
The previous president forged his poll for Harris by mail on Oct. 16. He died two months and two weeks later.