You call this a club? Carter was the prickly outsider, now Trump is the disrupter
The solemn participation of five presidents, current and former, at the state funeral for former President Jimmy Carter at Washington National Cathedral on Thursday might well have bemused, well, Jimmy Carter.
James Earl Carter was always the odd man out in the former-presidents club, at least until Donald Trump joined their ranks.
Carter didn't seem to care when he exasperated his successors by injecting himself into foreign policy or criticizing what they were doing in the office he once held. He had arrived in Washington in 1977 as an outsider, a one-term Georgia governor elected after the tumult of the Watergate scandal, and he (involuntarily) left town four years later the same way.
He had always been supremely confident in his judgment and the rightness of his views, regardless of those who might disagree or bristle. After he moved back to his hometown of Plains, Georgia, his decades of work on behalf of free elections, affordable housing and public health gave him the standing to say and do what he wanted.
Being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 helped, too.
Carter's "enduring attribute" was "character, character, character," President Joe Biden declared in his eulogy, the 46th president saying goodbye to the 39th. "Because of that, I believe character is destiny ? destiny in our lives and quite frankly, destiny in the life of our nation."
Sitting in the front row of the vaulted cathedral were not only Biden but also Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump. It was the first time as many as five current or former occupants of the Oval Office had gathered in one place since the funeral in 2018 of George H.W. Bush, another dearly departed member of their exclusive ranks.
Their united presence presumably stemmed from their sense of obligation for the rituals that unite and define the nation, like state funerals and presidential inaugurations. But it also may reflect the advice often misattributed to Yogi Berra: "Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise they won't go to yours."
There was a time when former presidents generally observed an implicit fraternity pledge to avoid publicly blasting their successors, even those they had battled in bitter campaigns. The elder Bush, denied a second term by Clinton, made a public commitment to stay out of the political to-and-fro, a promise he kept. He was "not in the press conference or the op-ed business," he told USA TODAY in an interview in 2002.
But Carter regularly violated that political norm through the administrations of Republicans and fellow Democrats alike.
"Just as he was free with sometimes unsolicited advice for his presidential successors, the Lord of all creation should be ready for Jimmy's recommendations on how to make God's realm a more peaceful place," former Carter adviser Stuart Eisenstat said in his funeral remarks, drawing knowing laughter from Presidents' Row.
Carter met with some foreign leaders when sitting presidents were trying to ostracize them, including Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hafez al-Assad of Syria. He traveled to North Korea to negotiate nuclear limits, then talked about the results on CNN before he had discussed them with then-President Clinton.
He made clear his contempt for Ronald Reagan and his policies, criticized Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, called the younger Bush's administration "the worst in history," and suggested that because of Russian interference Trump hadn't won the 2016 election fair and square.
Trump responded by calling him a "terrible president."
Yet Trump, 11 days away from being inaugurated for a second term, showed up at the funeral with his wife, Melania.
In a way, Trump's election in 2016 meant Carter was no longer the designated rogue. Biden, Obama and Clinton depicted Trump as a danger to democracy itself, a more consequential concern than anything ever leveled at Carter, who was honored for his work worldwide to strengthen democracies. Even George W. Bush, a lifelong Republican, didn't vote for Trump in 2020, instead writing in the name of his former secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.
Trump was seated next to Obama, the two men chatting and smiling. But neither Clinton nor Bush shook hands with Trump when they entered to be seated down the row from him, though Bush did give Obama a passing affectionate belly tap. Vice President Kamala Harris and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominees he defeated in 2024 and 2016, didn't make an effort to shake Trump's hand, either.
In an interview in 1997, Clinton offered USA TODAY an explanation for why it can be hard for presidents and former presidents to get along.
"When you have two strong-willed people and you've got a lot of things that happen over a long relationship, there will be from time to time when it's not just exactly like you'd like it to be," Clinton said for a story about his relationship with Carter.
Their history was fraught. As Arkansas governor, Clinton blamed then-President Carter for costing him a reelection bid. Carter's administration had housed Cuban refugees from the Mariel boatlift at Arkansas' Fort Chaffee, a damaging political move after riots there.
Carter acknowledged the strains. "We've been disappointed at times by a lack of easy communication and understanding with some of the people who work under President Clinton," he told USA TODAY in 1997.
Two years later, though, Clinton awarded Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Biden was closer to Carter than any of the other living presidents. Then the junior senator from Delaware, Biden was the first Democratic official outside Georgia to endorse Carter's presidential run. He was the last president or former president to meet with Carter to say goodbye.
On the 100th day of his presidency, Biden flew to Plains for a final meeting with Carter, then 96 years old and in declining health. That was when Carter first broached the idea of Biden delivering his eulogy, whenever that time came.
"Granted, I had some disagreements with him, and some of them were published," Biden told USA TODAY in an interview Sunday. He had been sufficiently disgruntled with Carter's leadership in 1980 that he briefly considered joining Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy in challenging him for the Democratic nomination. "But Carter was a decent man."
In his eulogy, Biden described his last meeting with Carter, in Plains. "We saw Jimmy as he always was, at peace with a life fully lived ? a good life, with purpose and meaning. Character, driven by destiny, and filled with the power of faith, hope and love.
"May God bless you, Jimmy Carter."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: You call this a club? Carter the outsider, now Trump the disrupter