Donald Trump is running against Joe Biden. But he keeps bringing up another Democrat: Jimmy Carter
ATLANTA– As Donald Trump campaigns for a return to the White House, he often reaches back more than four decades and seven administrations to disparage President Joe Biden by comparing him to 99-year-old Jimmy Carter.
Most recently, Trump used his first campaign stop after launching his criminal hush-money trial in New York to bully the 46th president by saying the 39th president, a recently widowed hospice patient who left office in 1981, was selfishly pleased with Biden’s state of service.
“Biden is the worst president in the history of our country, worse than Jimmy Carter by a long shot,” Trump said in a variation on a joke he used during the 2024 campaign, including as former first lady Rosalynn Carter was on her deathbed . . “Jimmy Carter is happy,” Trump continued about the two Democrats, “because he had a brilliant presidency compared to Biden.”
It was once common for Republicans like Trump to ridicule Carter. Many Democrats, including Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, also kept their distance for years after a troubled economy, energy shortages and a protracted U.S. hostage crisis led to Carter’s crushing defeat in 1980. However, the negative atmosphere subsided with passage time and reconsideration of Carter’s legacy as a political leader, Nobel laureate and global humanitarian.
That’s causing some observers, especially Democrats, to question Trump’s efforts to saddle Biden with the decades-old baggage of a weak man who closed his public life last November by silently mourning his wife of 77 years. to lead.
“It’s just a very dated reference,” said pollster Zac McCrary, whose Alabama-based company has worked for Biden. “It’s like a Democrat launching an attack on Gerald Ford, Herbert Hoover or William McKinley. It means nothing to voters other than Trump taking a cheap gamble on a figure that most Americans currently think has given a lot to his country and the world.”
Trump loyalists insist that even a near-centenarian is fair game in the rough realities of presidential politics.
“I probably said it in front of President Trump: Joe Biden is worse than Jimmy Carter,” said Debbie Dooley, a Georgia resident, an early national tea party organizer during Obama’s first term and a Trump supporter since the start of his campaign of 2016. Dooley said inflation under Biden justifies the parallel: “I’m old enough to remember the gas pipelines under President Carter.”
Any comparison, of course, implies a selective interpretation, and Trump’s decision to bring a third president into the campaign brings complications for all three — and perhaps some irony for Trump, who, like Carter, is running out of office after one term the voters were rejected.
Neither campaign responded to requests for comment on Trump’s Carter comparisons.
Carter remains at home in Plains, Georgia, where those close to him say he has been keeping up with the campaign. Biden is without a doubt the best friend Carter has had in the White House since he left it. Biden was a first-term lawmaker from Delaware when he became the first U.S. senator to back Carter’s underdog campaign. After winning the White House, Biden and first lady Jill Biden visited the Carters in Plains. They saw a grieving Carter privately before Rosalynn Carter’s funeral in Atlanta last year.
Like Carter, Biden is seeking re-election at a time when Americans are worried about inflation. But today’s economy is not the same as the one Carter faced.
The post-pandemic recovery, fueled by stimulus spending by the US and other governments, has been blamed on global inflation. In response, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.
But the effective Fed Funds rate is currently 5.33%, while the benchmark was above 17% for a key period before the 1980 election. Rates on a 30-year mortgage are about half of what they were at the height of Carter’s administration; Unemployment is less than half of the Carter peak. The average gas price per gallon in the US, which surpassed $3.60 this month, is higher than the peak of $3 under Trump. It reached $4.50 (adjusted for inflation) during Carter’s final year in office.
Carter and Trump actually share common ground. They are the clearest Washington outsiders in modern history looking to win the presidency, each fueled by voters’ dissatisfaction with the establishment.
Carter, a little-known governor and peanut farmer of Georgia, took advantage of the fallout from Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. Trump was the populist businessman and reality TV star who promised to “make America great again.” Both men defy ideological labels and are notable for their willingness to talk to dictators and isolated nations like North Korea, even as they offered different explanations as to why.
Carter warned his party against underestimating Trump’s appeal, and the Carters attended Trump’s inauguration in 2017. However, Jimmy Carter openly criticized Trump’s tendency to lie. After Carter suggested that Russian propaganda helped Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump began bashing Carter as a failure.
Unlike Carter, Trump has never accepted defeat. He falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen and then promoted debunked theories about the election that were repeated by supporters of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress met to certify Biden’s victory. Trump left Washington the morning Biden took office, becoming the first president since Andrew Johnson in 1869 to skip his successor’s inauguration.
Carter conceded to Republican Ronald Reagan, attended his inauguration and then returned to Georgia. There he and Rosalynn Carter founded the Carter Center in 1982. They spent decades advocating for democracy, mediating international conflicts and promoting public health in the developing world. With Habitat for Humanity they built houses for people with low incomes. Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Many historians’ judgment of Carter’s presidency has softened.
He is credited with deregulating much of the transportation sector, making air travel much more accessible to Americans, and creating the Department of Energy to streamline and coordinate the nation’s energy research. He negotiated the Camp David Peace Agreement between Egypt and Israel. He diversified the federal judiciary and the executive branch. He appointed Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who would join Reagan in taking credit for the economic growth of the 1980s. Carter was the first president to express concern about rising global temperatures. And it was Carter, along with his diplomatic team, who negotiated the release of American hostages in Tehran, although they were released only minutes after Carter’s term expired.
Biographies, documentaries and reporting on Carter’s tenth decade have reassessed that record.
In 2015, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 40% of registered voters believed Carter had done the best job since leaving office under presidents from Carter through George W. Bush. When Gallup asked voters last year to rate Carter’s handling of his presidency, 57% approved and 36% disapproved. (Trump measured 46% approval and 54% disapproval at the time, the first retroactive measure Gallup had run for him.)
“There has long been a general consensus of admiration for Carter as a person — a sense that he was a good and decent man,” said Amber Roessner, a professor at the University of Tennessee who studies collective public memory and has written extensively about Carter . The more recent conclusions about Carter as president, she added, suggest that “we should look at Carter’s presidency as a lens through which to think about how we measure the failure or success of any administration.”
How that factors into Biden’s rematch with Trump, Roessner said, “remains to be seen.”
Regardless, the ties between the 39th and 46th presidents remain, whatever the 45th president may say. When the time comes for Carter’s state funeral, Trump is expected to be invited along with Carter’s other living successors. But it will be Biden who delivers the eulogy.