WASHINGTON — New York developers like President-elect Donald Trump usually tear something down to make way for what’s coming. It became clear during the three days of Washington tributes to the late President Jimmy Carter this week that much of what Carter was praised for are accomplishments that Trump has promised to dismantle once he’s sworn into office in less than two weeks.
It makes sense when you think about it. In fact, if you tried to design Jimmy Carter’s polar opposite in a lab, you couldn’t do much better than the glitzy, brash New Yorker.
While Trump is known to love the pageantry and trappings of the White House, the grand pomp of Carter’s state funeral this week might have embarrassed the famously simple man from Plains. There were 21-gun salutes and the parades through the city, motorcades and constant tributes. Even Trump, who once called Carter the worst president in history, went to the Capitol rotunda Wednesday to pay a silent, respectful tribute where Carter lay in state.
Trump was also among the five living presidents Thursday who went to Carter’s state funeral in Washington’s iconic National Cathedral.
The heartfelt tributes there ranged from President Joe Biden, who said the reason he endorsed Carter for president in 1976 was “character, character, character,” to Carter’s grandson, Jason, who reminded the thousand-plus mourners that his famous grandfather was really a simple man at heart — a small-town, devoted Christian who was known to be so frugal he washed used Ziplock bags and hang them out to dry to use another day.
One speech that stood out among the praise-for-Carter-the-man eulogies was that of Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s White House domestic policy adviser, who also emphatically praised Carter-the-president. Unlike the conventional wisdom that said Carter’s greatest achievements came after he left office, Eizenstat said that Carter’s four years in the White House should be considered just as remarkable as his many good works after that.
“The test of American presidents is not the number of years they serve but the duration of their accomplishments,” Eizenstat said. “By this measure, Jimmy Carter was among the most consequential one-term presidents in American history.”
Eizenstat then laid out those Carter accomplishments. And when he did, it was impossible not to notice that many were programs, agencies or agendas that Trump has promised to do away with in his second term.
Above and beyond threatening last week to dump the Panama Canal Treaty that Trump said Carter “never should have signed,” Trump has also promised that one of his first acts in office will be abolishing the Department of Education, which Eizenstat noted Carter had created.
When he signed the bill creating the department in 1979, Carter said that he felt there had never been a single mechanism to improve education for all students across the country. Every teacher, every school board member, even every governor, had to figure it out for themselves. The new federal department would change that, he said. “That is a great step in the right direction.
But Trump now says the department is staffed by “radicals, zealots and Marxists,” and that he’ll send the money and full decision-making power back to states .
Another Carter achievement, Eizenstat said, was a series of conservation measures that made the former peanut farmer “the greatest environmental president since Theodore Roosevelt.” Along with putting solar panels on the roof of the White House, he said Carter protected more than 80 million acres of wilderness in Alaska through the National Park Service.
One of the areas Carter protected was the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, which Trump opened to oil drilling in 2017 for its “liquid gold” and has promised in his next term to aggressively develop.
“We’re going to be opening up ANWR,” Trump told an October rally. “We’re going to be doing all sorts of things that nobody thinks is possible.”
Helping Trump get that done will be Chris Wright, Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Energy, which Carter also created. Wright is an oil company CEO who said in a LinkedIn video last year that there is no climate crisis and that terms like “clean energy,” which Carter championed, are just malicious marketing buzzwords.
Eizenstat listed other Carter legacies, like the Camp David Accords and a massive deregulation of the telecom and transportation industries, that Trump will almost certainly leave intact. And he allowed that Carter had failures in office too, including the Iranian hostage crisis.
But Democrats worry that many of Carter’s other initiatives, on everything from civil rights to ethics reform, will be quickly dismissed as “wokeism” and the Deep State.
Ironically, Carter technically put the “Deep State” in place too, with the creation of the Senior Executive Service. Far from the secretive cabal that Trump paints federal employees to be, Carter established the SES to insulate civil service workers from political pressure and retribution from presidents. As Trump has promised more than once, he plans to be the retribution.
It all gets to a fundamental contrast between the two men. While Carter believed that government had the potential to help solve people’s problems, Trump thinks that government is the problem. For much of what Carter built while he was in the White House, Trump is about to the wrecking ball.
