Donald Trump is running against Joe Biden. But he continues to mention another Democrat: Jimmy Carter

ATLANTA (AP) – Like Donald Trump campaign for a return to the White House, he often goes back more than 40 years and seven administrations to belittle President Joe Biden by comparing him to a 99-year-old man. Jimmy Carter.

Most recently, Trump used his first campaign stop after the start of his criminal trial in New York to tease the 46th president by claiming that the 39th president, a recently widowed patient who left office in 1981, was selfishly satisfied with the Biden’s record.

“Biden is the worst president in the history of our country, worse than Jimmy Carter, by far,” Trump said in a variation of a quip he used throughout the 2024 campaign, notably as former first lady Rosalynn Carter was on her deathbed. . “Jimmy Carter is happy,” Trump continued of the two Democrats, “because he had a brilliant presidency compared to Biden.”

It was once common for Republicans like Trump to mock Carter. Many Democrats, including Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, also kept their distance for years, after a struggling economy, energy shortages and a long-running U.S. hostage crisis led to the Carter’s crushing defeat in 1980. The negative vibes, however, have lessened with the passage of time and a reconsideration of Carter’s legacy as a political leader, Nobel laureate and global humanitarian.

That’s leading some observers, Democrats in particular, to question Trump’s attempts to impose on Biden the decades-old baggage of a frail man who ended his public life last November in silent mourning. of his wife of 77 years.

“It’s just a very dated reference,” said pollster Zac McCrary, whose Alabama-based firm worked for Biden. “It’s like a Democrat launching an attack on Gerald Ford, Herbert Hoover or William McKinley. For voters, this means nothing except that Trump is attacking a figure that most Americans believe has brought much to their country and the world.”

Trump loyalists insist that even a near-centenarian is a legitimate target in the difficult reality of presidential politics.

“I probably said it before President Trump: Joe Biden is worse than Jimmy Carter,” said Georgia resident Debbie Dooley, an early national Tea Party organizer during Obama’s first term and a Trump supporter ever since. the start of his 2016 campaign. Dooley said inflation under Biden justifies the parallel: “I’m old enough to remember the gas lines under President Carter. »

Any comparison, of course, involves selective interpretation, and Trump’s decision to introduce a third president into the campaign brings complications for all three — and perhaps some irony for Trump, who, like Carter, was rejected by voters after one mandate.

Neither campaign responded to requests for comment on Trump’s comparisons to Carter.

Carter remains at home in Plains, Ga., where those close to him say he has been following the campaign. Biden is undoubtedly the closest friend Carter has had in the White House since he left it. Biden was a first-term Delaware lawmaker when he became the first U.S. senator to support Carter’s underdog campaign. After winning the White House, Biden and the first lady Jill Biden visited the Carters on the Plains. They saw Carter grieving 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 economy that Carter faced.

The post-pandemic rebound, fueled by stimulus spending by the United States and other governments, has been blamed on global inflation. In response, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.

But the effective federal funds rate is currently 5.33%, while the benchmark was above 17% during a key period before the 1980 election. Rates on a 30-year mortgage are about half that. that they were at the height of the Carter administration; unemployment is less than half of the Carter peak. The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States, which exceeds $3.60 this month, is higher than the peak of $3 reached under Trump. It reached $4.50 (adjusted for inflation) in the last year of Carter’s term.

Carter and Trump actually share common ground. They are the most obvious Washington underdogs in modern history to win the presidency, each fueled by voters’ discontent with the establishment.

Georgia’s governor and little-known peanut farmer, Carter exploited the fallout from Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. Trump was the populist businessman and reality TV star who vowed to “make America great again.” Both men defy ideological labels, distinguishing themselves by their willingness to speak to dictators and isolated countries like North Korea, even as they offered different explanations for why.

Carter warned his party against underestimating Trump’s appeal, and the Carters attended Trump’s inauguration in 2017. Jimmy Carter, however, has openly criticized Trump’s penchant for lying. After Carter suggested that Russian propaganda helped Trump elect Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump began insulting Carter as a failure.

Unlike Carter, Trump never accepted defeat. He falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen, then promoted debunked theories about the election that were repeated by supporters of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as Congress was meeting to certify Biden’s victory. Trump left Washington the same 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, then returned to Georgia. There, he and Rosalynn Carter founded the Carter Center in 1982. They spent decades defending democracy, mediating international conflicts, and advancing public health in developing countries. They built homes for low-income people with Habitat for Humanity. 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 industry, 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 judicial and executive power. He named Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who, along with Reagan, would be responsible for the economic growth of the 1980s. Carter was the first president to express concern about rising global temperatures. And it was Carter, with his diplomatic team, who negotiated the release of the American hostages in Tehran, even though they were not released until minutes after Carter’s term expired.

Biographies, documentaries, and media reports throughout Carter’s tenth decade have reassessed this record.

In 2015, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 40 percent of registered voters considered Carter to have done the best job since leaving office among presidents from Carter to George W. Bush. When Gallup asked voters last year to rate Carter’s handling of his presidency, 57 percent approved and 36 percent disapproved. (Trump measured 46% approval and 54% disapproval at the time, the first retroactive measurement Gallup had taken for him.)

“There has long been a general consensus of admiration for Carter as a person — this feeling that he was a good and honest man,” said Amber Roessner, a professor at the University of Tennessee who studies collective public memory and has written extensively about Carter. The most recent findings on Carter as president, she added, suggest that “we should view Carter’s presidency as a lens for thinking about reassessing how we evaluate the failure or success of any administration”.

How that will play into Biden’s rematch with Trump, Roessner said, “remains to be seen.”

Regardless, the ties between the 39th and 46th presidents endure, no matter what the 45th president says. When it comes time for Carter’s state funeral, Trump is expected to be invited alongside Carter’s other living successors. But it will be Biden who delivers the eulogy.