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It was as though God was keeping a sardonic eye on the calendar. That Jimmy Carter, America’s most moralistic president, received his state funeral days before the notably contrasting Donald Trump returns to office seemed almost divinely arranged.
Trump’s aides say it is hard to make him to listen to anyone for more than a few minutes. On Thursday at the US national cathedral in Washington, the president-elect sat through 90 minutes of paean to the qualities of virtue and character.
“We told the truth, we obeyed the law, we kept the peace,” said the late Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice-president, in a posthumous eulogy read by his son. Along with the four other living presidents, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, America’s next president was sitting just a few feet away.
Carter, who became America’s first presidential centenarian in October, let it be known that he was clinging on to life so he could vote for Kamala Harris to win November’s election. That prayer went unanswered. Carter died a few weeks after Trump’s victory, ending a life that spanned 40 per cent of the existence of the US republic.
He was born in the small town of Plains, Georgia and lived in a house without running water or electricity. He died in the same town and in the modest home where he had lived with his late wife Rosalynn since the 1950s. They married in 1946, less than a month after Trump was born. His presidency ended in the landslide 1980 defeat to Ronald Reagan four years before the incoming US vice-president JD Vance’s birth. Carter was never interested in money.
Biden, who gave the keynote eulogy, was the first Democratic senator to endorse Carter’s improbable presidential bid in 1976. The outgoing president, now 82, said Carter stood for “character, character, character”. Almost nobody had heard of this obscure Georgian governor when the young Biden backed him. The New York Times journalist Johnny Apple famously referred to him as “Jimmy Who?”
On Thursday, America was reminded of what Carter became. Though his one-term presidency is dismissed as a failure by some, including by Trump on many occasions, a contrasting account of his legacy was laid out in the cathedral. Special emphasis seemed to be placed on elements that Trump vows to undo. Carter created the departments of energy and education, returned the Panama Canal to Panamanian sovereignty, recognised man-made climate change, promoted investment in wind, solar and other clean technologies, professionalised the federal civil service, and elevated human rights into US foreign policy.
“Some thought he was crazy to pass those [climate change] laws,” said one of his grandsons. “But he was right and we know that now.”
If funerals are for the living not the dead, Carter’s served as a reminder of America’s wildly contrasting political tendencies. Trump is about to retake power in a spirit of revenge. Carter, whose piety turned into a political liability, spoke of love, perhaps a little too often. Both, ironically, were outsiders who ran on populist platforms. But their ideas of populism could not have been further apart. They shared a disdain for Washington. In his statement following Carter’s death, Trump was surprisingly gracious: “He worked hard to make America a better place, and for that I give him my highest respect.” When Carter turned 100, Trump said that Biden was in fact “the worst” president and that he made Carter look “brilliant” by comparison.
Either way, to Trump’s irritation, the US flag will remain at half-mast for the full 30 days accorded to each president after their death. The stars and stripes will thus be lowered when Trump takes the oath of office on January 20th. Perhaps that is another of God’s little jokes.
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