“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.” These were the gracious words posted by the once and future U.S. President Donald J. Trump to his Truth Social platform upon learning of the death on December 29 of his long-ago Democratic predecessor Jimmy Carter, who held office from 1977 to 1981. Carter had entered hospice care in February 2023 and celebrated his 100th birthday on October 1, expressing his wish to live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Carter was the longest-lived American president to date and died just as Joe Biden, the oldest U.S. president ever to hold office, prepares to leave the White House to make way for Trump, who in November became the oldest man ever elected to presidential office.
Carter, who consistently violated the custom that past presidents do not criticize their successors, is on record calling Trump a “liar” and predicting that a second Trump term would be “a disaster.” Trump’s social media statement decidedly took the high road, with the incoming president adding in a later post that Carter was “a truly good man.” In the past, Trump had given the late former president backhanded compliments, calling him “brilliant” in comparison to Biden, a longtime Carter ally and the first Democratic senator to endorse him for the presidency. It has been confirmed that the flags at Trump’s January 20 inauguration will fly at half-staff to conform with the normal thirty-day period of official mourning that follows the death of an American president. Presumably, Trump will appear at Carter’s funeral.
Formalities notwithstanding, mainstream U.S. media is already seizing on Carter’s life and post-presidential legend to score direct and oblique political points at Trump’s expense, a successful messaging campaign as some American conservatives sit back and politely offer good wishes and selective praise.
The truth, of course, is that Carter was one of the worst presidents in American history, featuring close to the bottom even in ranking surveys by overwhelmingly leftist academics and media personalities. When he left office in 1981, inflation stood at 12.5%. His four-year mandate witnessed an energy crisis that created painful gas shortages, a national affordability crisis that began the current ‘hollowing out’ of the middle class, severe compromises in America’s strategic position around the world, global advances by Soviet-aligned communist regimes, a dramatic increase in the bureaucratic apparatus and burdensome expense of the U.S. federal government, and a hostage crisis in Iran, where 52 diplomats were held for 444 days while the administration floundered and a rescue mission Carter authorized ingloriously failed.
In the 1980 presidential election, the American people denied him a second term in a landslide rebuke, with Republican Ronald Reagan prevailing by nearly 10% in the popular vote and winning 46 of the fifty U.S. states. Carter left office with one of the lowest approval ratings of any president. In 1984, Reagan defeated Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, in an even greater rout. The only path for Carter’s party to return to executive office was to shed his legacy in favor of almost radical commitment to centrism, defined by Bill Clinton’s recasting as a “New Democrat.”
It may be unfair to judge a centenarian by the events of just 4% of his life. But neither life nor politics is fair. Nor was the torment of the embassy hostages, the mass suffering of the developing world populations subjected to communism during his weak presidency, or the immiseration of tens of millions of Americans in his terrible economy. The best Carter’s defenders can say for him is that he was an “honorable” man, or, as Biden said the day after he died, a man defined by “decency, decency, decency.” Conceit allowed Carter not merely to mask the failures of his presidency in the decades that remained to him, but also to define himself as a model politician and model citizen. This should not take away from an earnest appreciation of his humanitarian achievements in the realm of public health or quality-of-life work, where he used his clout to accomplish great things and in 2002 won the Nobel Peace Prize. No amount of gloss, however, can disguise the fundamental truth: Jimmy Carter failed in virtually everything he set out to do as the leader of the free world.
Jimmy Carter left his country poorer and weaker than it had been at any time in its modern history. He diminished its power and prestige. He spoke openly of a “crisis of the American spirit” whose symptoms, he said on national television “are all around us.” In the name of misguided globalist projects, he held back America and its people, even chiding them that they expected too much peace and prosperity in a world that he seemed to believe should no longer accommodate their excellence and exceptionalism.
In foreign policy, he gave away the Panama Canal, a military and commercial asset of epochal proportions, in exchange for nothing and in the naïve name of good will. He officially recognized communist China, setting its heinous regime’s rise to a superpower status that will likely rival America’s in the current century. His approach to the Middle East made a limited peace between Israel and Egypt, but foregrounded the Palestinian cause to the extent that further peace deals came haltingly, with no further progress until 1994 and then 2020. His renewal of détente with the Soviet Union ceded strategic weapons superiority and favorable trade deals to Moscow in exchange for proffered geopolitical restraint that never came.
And in the most glaring catastrophe, he sold out the Shah of Iran in favor of “democracy,” only to watch that democracy be subverted by radical Islamists who hated the United States, plunged Iran into decades of theocratic darkness, and took the U.S. embassy staff hostage while Carter had no solution to offer. He may have made up for that sorry moment in decades of service, but it will burn brightly as the defining one of his life.
