CNN
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The public wants to know what the hell Donald Trump and Barack Obama were talking about.
The powerful state funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, held 11 days before the 45th president was sworn in as the 47th president, was distilled into a long and hilarious exchange between archenemies.
The memorial service, held at the National Cathedral in Washington, honors a humble man from a small Georgia town who rose to great power: a peanut farmer, a nuclear physicist, a submariner, a husband, a father, and a civil rights activist. It was an ode to a pioneer, president, and late Nobel Prize winner. Last month, I turned 100 years old.
But it was also a layered melodrama about the country’s perilous political moment, with a vicious confrontation left alone for an hour or so by the dignity of mourning.
In a rare sight, the former president’s fraternity came together. The two rows in front of the cathedral displayed the tumultuous stories, feuds and frictions of the past three decades, when American politics tore the country apart.
President Joe Biden was the last to arrive, holding hands with First Lady Jill Biden in one of his final official acts as president. The first couple sat with Vice President Kamala Harris, who unsuccessfully tried to find a successor, and her deadpan husband, Douglas Emhoff. Immediately to Biden’s left was Trump, whose solo debate effectively ended his career and exposed the president’s declining ability. Trump then dashed Harris’ 2024 White House dreams.
Behind Harris was Hillary Clinton, who also prevented Trump from becoming the first female president to break through the toughest and highest ceiling in American politics. The former secretary of state, New York state senator, and first lady was joined by her husband Bill Clinton, now the last living president of the 20th century.
There was a palpable sense that an era in politics was over, as nearly all of the foreign presidents of President Carter’s term, which lasted just one term from 1977 to 1981, had already departed. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a frequent target of President Trump who only recently announced his resignation, cited one connection to the past. He is the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who served as prime minister during much of the Carter administration.
Clinton sat next to former President George W. Bush in an unusual trip to Washington for a Republican. Mr. Bush gave another analogy about the passage of time. Now 78, he doesn’t have the energy to throw up the awkward towel that he did during the 2000 campaign. You can take the boy out of the frat, but you can’t take the frat out of the boy. President Bush greeted his successor, President Obama, with a manly pat on the stomach.
Mr. Obama has achieved what other presidents might consider short-lived: second-in-command to Mr. Trump. But he didn’t retreat into conversation with former first lady Laura Bush, who was to his right. He immediately broke out into a big smile while chatting with the president-elect, who he campaigned fiercely against last fall.
Obama is a polite person, and people who have spent time with Trump say that despite his public cantankerousness, he is funny and entertaining in private. So maybe they were just kidding. But their history and open public disdain made their interaction one of the most extraordinary moments in a vicious political era.
After all, Trump rose to power with a racist and false conspiracy about Obama’s place of birth, and even now, he points out at rallies that his middle name is Hussein, calling him the 44th president. It criticizes the president’s nationality and faith. Obama sees Trump as the antithesis of everything America stands for. Just a few months ago, at the Democratic National Convention, he derided Trump as “a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped complaining about his problems since he took the golden escalator nine years ago.” He blasted “childish nicknames, crazy conspiracy theories, and bizarre obsessions with crowd size,” and likened President Trump to a neighbor running a leaf blower outside his window. “To the neighbors, it’s exhausting. To the president, it’s dangerous.”
Love is not lost yet. But the past 15 years have been a duel between Obamaism and Trumpism, so perhaps the country can take solace in knowing they can at least talk to each other. As for the subject of their conversation, no one knows. Maybe it was golf, maybe that’s the only obsession they share.
There was one notable absence from the ranks of the First Family. Michelle Obama may be finding public generosity more difficult than her husband, branding Trump a misogynistic racist in her own Democratic convention speech.
Emotional meeting between Gore and Pence
Behind the president were Vice Presidents Dan Quayle, Al Gore, and Mike Pence, who greeted Trump with a formal handshake, a sign that once and future presidents have been accused of stealing the 2020 election. It was a remnant of the breakup that occurred when they tried to do so.
There was an emotional moment as Pence and Gore — two vice presidents who chose the Constitution and prioritized moving the country forward from a disputed election — stood chatting. After the president stepped down first with VIP treatment and VEEP was left waiting to leave with the rest of the people, the humiliation and thwarted ambitions of No. 2 were exposed. They were trapped in the third seat of the cathedral, figuratively trapped in American public life, beyond the reach of presidential privilege.
There was another former president who paid homage to Carter, at least in spirit and word. Former President Gerald Ford, who was ousted from the White House by President Carter in the 1976 election and died in 2006, wrote a eulogy for his rival who became a close friend, which was read by his son Stephen.
In Photos: Remembering Jimmy Carter
In his final address to the nation, Gerald Ford said that with Carter, “Political defeat and writing can also be liberating if they allow free discussion of topics that are not necessarily short-sighted.” After learning this, I wrote that even the intense hostility of politics began to fade. The term political popularity. ”
After reading the eulogy, Stephen Ford turned to Carter’s children and said, “God did a good thing when he created your father.”
But even death cannot quell political malice. And a state funeral is a Washington ritual that provides a final opportunity to atone for past sins and write the history of a presidential administration. Stuart Eisenstat, Carter’s former domestic policy director, offered a gem of a quote that applies to past presidents, especially Biden. “The test of an American president is not the number of terms he serves, but the duration of his accomplishments.”
Carter was a one-term president, but after his death his often-mocked presidency was reassessed and praised for his accomplishments, including the Camp David Middle East peace agreement and early embrace of environmentalism. There is.
Given President Trump’s impending inauguration and his accomplishments in disrupting presidential norms, public decorum, and constitutional guardrails, we honor Mr. Carter, who was known for championing democracy and piety worldwide. Funerals will always take on an allegorical dimension.
The jab at Trump wasn’t as overt as the one aimed at him at former Arizona Sen. John McCain’s funeral in 2018, but it was still unmistakable.
Ted Mondale, Mr. Carter’s son with the late Vice President Walter Mondale, read a eulogy prepared by his father, attempting to sum up Mr. Carter and Mr. Carter’s presidency in his final days in office: I recalled what I came up with. . We followed the law. We kept the peace. ”
It would be difficult to apply two-thirds of that adage to President Trump after his first term. Trump, a climate change denier, sat next to future first lady Melania Trump as Mondale praised Carter for his early recognition of global warming, which is causing deadly fires in Los Angeles. He looked at his medal.
The state funeral is a gathering of the Washington clan, a convocation of the very system President Trump vowed to destroy in his second term. Carter was not a clubber, and his self-conscious piety sometimes irritated his successors. He was the most disturbing member of the former president’s club, other than Trump.
But since his death, he has become the embodiment of values that many of Trump’s critics see as under threat as Trump’s new term begins.
Biden is the closest living president to Carter. He supported Mr. Trump as a junior senator in the 1976 presidential race, and gave Mr. Trump a secret rebuke in the final weeks of his administration. Given Biden’s antipathy toward his predecessor and successor, it’s hard not to think his eulogy contains deliberate criticism.
“We have a duty to give no safe haven to hate, and to stand up to what my father once said is the greatest sin: the abuse of power,” Biden said. “We are all fallible. But it’s about asking ourselves, are we striving to do the right thing? What values – our ethos? What are the values that animate us? Do we act out of fear or out of hope? Are we showing grace?”
The state funeral marks a poignant moment in American history, highlighting the aging of public figures with whom this country was young.
Amy Carter, now middle-aged, but remembered by older Americans as a carefree high school girl who grew up in the White House, had mortal pain etched in her face.
And in one of the most moving moments of a ceremony often embroidered with poignant national fables, the Rev. Andrew Young, who was with Martin Luther King Jr. when he was assassinated, lay beside Carter’s casket. I was sitting. He recalled how the former president grew up in a rural, mostly black area of Georgia and began his century as a courageous advocate for racial equality in his home state and in the White House.
Young, President Carter’s former ambassador to the United Nations, read aloud from the Bible at the end of the service. This must have been especially painful for the former presidents, who were watching their own funerals in an eerie way.
The achievements, regrets, thwarted ambitions, and grudges that still echo in the presidential box will mean less in the end. Sooner or later, each of them would end up in the nave, like Carter, in a coffin draped with an American flag.
