Former President Carter’s death ushers out a more forgiving approach to politics

An example to follow

Shortly after former peanut farmer and US president Jimmy Carter died aged 100, President Joe Biden said that Donald Trump would do well to take a leaf out of Carter’s book.

"Decency"

Asked what, if anything, Trump could learn from the President-turned-humanitarian who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, Biden replied: “Decency, decency, decency.”

End of an era

Given Carter’s tendency to make amends with those he had clashed with, his death on December 29, 2024, seems to mark the end of a gentler era in politics.

A more dignified approach

“Can you imagine Jimmy Carter referring to someone by the way they look or the way they talk? I can’t,” Biden is reported saying in The Guardian.

Conflict resolution

Despite fallouts with various politicians before and after taking power for just one term in 1977, Carter managed to find a way to resolve personal conflicts.

Mending fences with Gerald Ford

Perhaps most notably, Carter became close friends with former Republican president, Gerald Ford, after calling his policies “morally and politically and intellectually bankrupt” in the presidential race that Carter won in 1976

And Bill Clinton

He also managed to patch things up with Bill Clinton despite their differences, inviting the Clintons to he and his wife Rosalynn’s 75th wedding anniversary in 2021 –Rosalynn died in 2023.

And Teddy Kennedy

And he made sure to reconcile with rival Senator Edward Kennedy, who challenged his Democratic presidential nomination for a second term in office.

Contradictory character

“This is one of the most interesting paradoxes about Carter,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss told The Washington Post. “He had very fierce feelings about people, but at the same time, he did like to reconcile.”

An unusual juxtaposition

“At least in my life experience, you don’t find both of those tendencies so intensely in the same person,” he added.

Reagan remained at arm's length

Carter did not, however, make up with President Reagan who dismantled many of his policies, specifically those leading to a shift away from fossil fuels.

An enduring enmity with Trump

Neither did he get around to addressing his enmity with Donald Trump who made various digs at Carter during his recent presidential campaign.

Verbal attacks

“Joe is the worst president in the history of our country,” Trump would say on the 2024 campaign trail. “Jimmy Carter is the happiest man because the Carter administration by comparison was totally brilliant.”

"A disaster"

Carter, in turn, let it be known that he believed Trump only won the 2016 election thanks to Russian interference, calling the President-elect “a disaster.”

Worlds apart

According to Carter biographer Jonathan Alter in The Guardian: “I sent Carter an email saying: ‘Do you think you have anything in common with Donald Trump?’ and I got back a one-word response: ‘No.’”

Trump to attend state funeral

Despite Trump’s verbal assaults on Carter even while he was in hospice care, the President-elect has said he will attend Carter’s state funeral on January 9 and has called him "a truly good man."

The last of his kind?

“Moments like this tell us as much about ourselves as they do about the person being honored and commemorated,” Jon Meacham, a presidential historian, told MSNBC.

"The end of something…"

“And I think President Carter dying at this hour in the life of the republic is a reminder that we are at the end of something.”

Never miss a story! Click here to follow The Daily Digest.