Trump's praise of Carter in death after jeering him in life deepens a contradictory relationship

PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Living to 100 let Jimmy Carter fulfill his wish to vote for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris against Republican Donald Trump in November. His death means flags at the White House will be at half-staff when Trump regains the presidency on Jan. 20.

Starkly different in their political beliefs and personal lives, in their actions as president and after leaving office, Carter and Trump will again be intertwined as the memory and legacy of one linger while the other is inaugurated for a second time. It'll be another example of how the two have continued to overlap in often contradictory ways, even though their terms were separated by nearly 40 years.

Trump singled out Carter for intense criticism during the 2024 campaign, repeatedly mocking him to fire up supporters. He called President Joe Biden “the worst” but said he made Carter look “brilliant” by comparison. He even delivered the line on Carter’s 100th birthday in October.

The president-elect also promised to use his second term to undo some of Carter's signature accomplishments. He wants to roll back environmental protections, potentially renege on a 1977 treaty ceding control of the Panama Canal back to its home country and dismantle the federal Department of Education that Carter helped create in 1979.

Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday, Trump again bristled at Carter's role in transferring control 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 running the canal, “They laugh at us because they think we’re stupid. Well, we’re not stupid anymore.”

Those comments came on the day Carter's remains were being flown to Washington, where he will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol. Pressed on if criticism of Carter was appropriate 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, even though he had first mentioned it unprompted.

Yet Trump is planning to attend Carter's funeral, and his statement marking the former 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 also called 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 post on his social media network. “He worked hard to make America a better place, and for that I give him my highest respect.”

Amber Roessner, a University of Tennessee professor and media historian, said that, for candidate Trump, “Carter became the perfect metaphor with which to critique the Biden administration” given the parallel battles the Democrats faced on inflation and unrest in the Middle East. But she said Carter and Trump share a similar political ethos as outsiders who stoked populism and challenged and vexed the political establishment.

Roessner, who sat down with Carter for an extended interview in 2014, said both he and Trump successfully presented themselves as authentic in an often otherwise 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 said. "Both of them fit the political moment.”

Carter, the 39th president, was an outspoken and devout Baptist who was married to the same woman for 77 years and taught Sunday school while president and afterward. He offered this advice to Trump in 2019: “Keep the peace, promote human rights and tell the truth.”

Trump, the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president, has been married three times and was convicted of making hush money payments to cover up an extramarital affair with a porn actor.

Yet, as candidates and as presidents, Carter and Trump both knew how to best maximize media coverage and were both critical of the media, Roessner said, especially political reporters they viewed as out of touch.

She pointed to a 1976 interview with Playboy magazine in which Carter found fault with the reporters who followed his 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.”

Carter, though, never went nearly as far as Trump, who has branded the press the “enemy of the people,” dismisses factual reporting he doesn’t like as “fake news” and criticizes journalists at his rallies harshly enough to spur loud booing from the audience.

During the 2016 election, Carter cautioned his party about underestimating Trump’s appeal. Both men also defy ideological labels, standing out for their willingness to talk to dictators and isolated nations.

In 2018, Carter offered to travel to North Korea on the Trump administration’s behalf. The following year, Trump called Carter to speak about China. He later described what was said as a “very good telephone conversation” and added that he'd “always liked President Carter.”

Things weren't always cordial, though.

In 2014, Trump mistakenly referred to the former president at a conservative conference as “the late, great Jimmy Carter." While Trump was president, Carter suggested that an investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election might “show that Trump didn’t actually win," even though the investigation never came close to substantiating that baseless claim.

Carter also criticized Trump for withholding U.S. funds to the World Health Organization during the coronavirus pandemic. Trump said during a G20 Summit in 2019 that Carter was nice but “a terrible president.”

Lindsay Chervinksy, a presidential historian and executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon in Virginia, said that Trump’s statements after Carter's death were “what you do when a president dies and is considered to be best form” but that the president-elect’s more derogatory campaign comments on Carter were probably closer to his real thoughts.

Indeed, 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.

Despite what unfolded post-presidency, Carter’s deflated reputation when he left the White House in 1981 seemed frozen for Trump, who often uses that decade of his own 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 targeted killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani. He said that number represented the 52 American hostages taken by Iran when Carter was in office.

“Much of what Trump says is shaped by the 1980s,” Chervinksy said. "In that era Carter was synonymous with what it meant to be a failed, one-term president.”

Carter significantly rehabilitated his political image after his presidency. Following his landslide reelection defeat, Carter returned to Georgia, where he and his wife, Rosalynn, established the Carter Center in 1982. He then spent decades advocating for democracy, mediating international conflict and advancing public health globally. The couple also built houses with Habitat for Humanity.

The former president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Trump never accepted his defeat to Biden in 2020 and shunned the typical post-presidency efforts to become an elder statesman and burnish his legacy with new endeavors. Instead, he vowed retribution against political enemies and mounted a political comeback that made him the first president since Grover Cleveland in 1893 to reclaim the White House in nonconsecutive terms.

Carter entered hospice care in February 2023. He said his goal was “only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,” his grandson, Jason Carter, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in August.

The former president cast his ballot for Harris by mail on Oct. 16. He died two months and two weeks later.