Many people believe Jimmy Carter represented a “better America.” And, shortly before Donald Trump returns to office, Washington will honor the late former president in Washington one last time. However, the country has opted for a radically different course some time ago.
Two people could scarcely be more different. One was a peacemaker and philanthropist who used his first day in office to pardon young Americans who evaded military service during the Vietnam War. In his private life, he flew economy class and fought for the homeless and the poor. The other man, by contrast, makes a show of jetting around in his personal Boeing 757. He denigrates immigrants as “vermin,” levels threats at his political critics, and has promised to pardon the instigators of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot the minute he takes office.
Last fall, at the age of 100, Jimmy Carter cast his mail-in vote for Kamala Harris. It was a final act of defiance against Donald Trump, whom the devoutly Christian peanut farmer considered to be an idiot and a danger to democracy. Now, the 39th U.S. president has died. His body will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda beginning on Tuesday. Exactly 24 hours earlier, on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Congress certified Trump’s election as 47th president. The ceremonies could not be more symbolic.
Trump once looked out of place alongside former U.S. presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Carter and their wives at the state funeral for George H. W. Bush in 2018. And Joe Biden replaced him as president two years later. Yet, Trump has now come to dominate U.S. politics again since his reelection.
The Last Stand for the America of Old
There will probably be a lot of rhetoric about national reflection and unity at the memorial service. But such platitudes already rang hollow at George H. W. Bush’s funeral some six years ago, when the old America turned out once again at Washington’s National Cathedral. “We’re better than that!” said Biden, who invoked such traditional values as decency and bipartisanship in the years that followed, but whose agenda tragically foundered.
Truth be told, Trump, with his hatred and rabble-rousing, is no mere historical aberration. Rather, he reflects an angry and exhausted nation’s troubled state of mind, which, in turn, is being cynically fueled by a tech-bro oligarchy. In 2025, the United States no longer stands as the beacon of liberal democracy and rules-based international order it once was. It’s not only Jimmy Carter that is being laid to rest in Washington, D.C. this week.
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