In thinking about the choices any new presidential administration faces, something occurred to me about Donald Trump that may be worth considering by Democrats trying to cope with him, so I wrote about it at New York:

Having never lacked faith in himself, Donald Trump probably feels completely entitled to his 2024 election win, the governing trifecta it created, and the relatively high levels of popularity (for him, anyway) that made it all possible. But the odds are very high that between the weighty national problems he inherits and the controversial nature of some of the things he wants to do, he’s probably at the summit of his popularity. As Ross Barkan recently argued at New York, there may be nowhere to go but down:

“Now are the days of wine and roses for MAGA because Joe Biden is still president and Trump’s reign remains hypothetical. On January 20, the script flips: The inflation and affordability crises are Trump’s problems. So is governing, which he has never excelled at. While Trump’s second term may promise, in theory, less chaos than his first, there isn’t much evidence that his White House will evince the grim, rapacious discipline of the Bush-Cheney years, when Republicans actually dominated all policymaking at home and abroad.”

Trump does, however, have some control over how much popularity he is willing to lose. Like anyone who becomes president with some political capital and the ready means to use it (i.e., controlling Congress as well as the White House, and having a lot of friends on the U.S. Supreme Court too), the 47th president will have to decide whether to take some risks on policies that are very likely to reduce his popularity or, instead, play to the galleries. To put it even more simply, he can cash in some chips on stuff he wants to do that could offend or even shock some of the people who voted for him or keep building his stash for the future. Given Trump’s almost unlimited control over his troops in Washington, he can probably go in either direction, but that choice of direction could have an enormous impact on those of us who would greatly prefer a less ambitious MAGA agenda.

There are a lot of reasons Trump may not care if he remains popular while fulfilling his presidential goals. This is the final presidential term of a 78-year-old man; for him, the future really is right now. Yes, forcing unpopular measures through Congress might endanger the fragile Republican control of the House in the 2026 midterms. But history indicates it’s very likely Democrats will flip the House no matter what Republicans do, and let’s face it: The long-range future of the Republican Party may not be of great interest to the president-elect. Even after being nominated as its presidential candidate three straight times while gradually grinding down intraparty opposition to a fine dust, Trump still acts suspiciously toward his party’s Establishment and clearly views it as a vehicle rather than a cause. This is more speculative, but given his personality profile the 47th president may even prefer, or at least not mind, a falloff in the GOP’s electoral performance once he’s gone.

Add in Trump’s impulsiveness, which doesn’t suggest someone for whom delay of gratification comes naturally, and it seems a “go big, then be gone” attitude is likely. Beyond that, it’s unclear how sensitive this man is to changes in popularity: He’s never been in an election he didn’t think he’d won, and he has a tendency to ignore the polls that give him news he doesn’t want in favor of the one or two that show support for his agenda and message always remaining sky-high. If he did something that made his popularity crash, would he even notice it, and if not, would any of the sycophants around him break the bad — and possibly fake — news?

All in all, the best bet is that Donald Trump will pursue his maximum agenda with little regard to how anyone feels about it so long as he’s getting it done. Perhaps Republican officeholders (e.g., his vice-president) who have plans beyond 2028 can talk him into more prudent conduct; but in case you haven’t noticed, he’s stubborn, and it will probably take a lot of blatant, in-your-face adversity to change his course. Democrats can supply some of that, of course, but a stronger than usual popular backlash could matter most.

 

In trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in news from Washington, I pointed out some issues in the Trump transition that ought to encourage Democrats, and wrote about them at New York:

Even before Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, we were being assured — or in some cases warned — that Trump 2.0 would be a lean, mean MAGA machine in sharp contrast to its chaotic predecessor regime. There were an immense number of predictions that the 47th president would “hit the ground running” the very moment he was inaugurated, having gotten a head start with an unusually early roster of major appointments and enjoying total power over a Republican Party in which pre-Trump habits have been hunted to extinction. He claimed a historic mandate to do whatever he wanted, and the only big doubt was whether the revolution he promised in American life and government would be most rapidly promoted by his lapdog Congress or via his own lordly exercises of executive power.

In an interview with Politico, longtime Trump intimate Steve Bannon thought it important to rebrand the transition in order to capture the breathtaking speed with which everything would happen:

““I tell people, “shock and awe was a ’17 concept.” ‘Days of thunder,’ I think are gonna be the concepts starting next Monday,’ Bannon said. ‘And I think these days of thunder starting next week are going to be incredibly, incredibly intense.'”

Despite all the hype, as Inauguration Day approaches, there are signs that Trump 2.0 may actually be off schedule in important respects. The only major nominee who is likely to be confirmed by the Senate on Day One is the least controversial, Marco Rubio as secretary of State. Trump’s fantasy of getting the entire Cabinet instantly approved, which appears to have driven his timetable of appointments, is dissipating rapidly. There’s still considerable uncertainty over the scope of initial executive orders and pardons. But most importantly, the administration’s loyal troops in Congress are still in disarray over their basic legislative strategy for implementing the 47th president’s agenda — disarray that extends to many important details.

In 2017, prior to Trump taking the oath of office, congressional Republicans quickly agreed on a two-stage legislative strategy for the year, with one filibuster-proof budget-reconciliation bill being devoted to the repeal of Obamacare and other spending measures and another designed to enact tax cuts. They enacted a budget resolution to set up all this legislation a week before Inauguration Day (Democrats did the same prior to Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021). But House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have yet to agree on the most basic blueprint for 2025: the number and scope of budget-reconciliation bills, which in turn will determine how rapidly they can move to implement the Trump agenda, as Politico reports:

“Under the best-case scenario laid out by Johnson this week, it will be late February before Republicans find themselves similarly situated this time — and even then, the one-bill-versus-two-bill question might not be settled.

“The inability to answer central strategic questions now foreshadows much bigger problems ahead.”

Even if Johnson bends the knee and agrees to a two-bill strategy enabling an initial budget-reconciliation bill on border security and energy as Thune prefers, it won’t come with the speed that made this strategy compelling to senators in the first place. It appears, for example, that the administration won’t have the money to really get mass deportation rolling immediately, as they wished. And despite the pleas from both chambers that Trump resolve the strategic deadlock between House and Senate, the president-elect has refused to play referee, all but saying out loud that it’s not his job. Beyond the one-bill/two-bill dispute, GOP members of Congress are quietly begging Trump to delete items from his executive-order blitz that they might need legislatively to generate budget savings to pay for border spending and tax cuts. There’s zero clarity about how Elon Musk’s DOGE will enter into the equation, beyond the scary recognition that he commands a gigantic troll army that will order Republicans in Congress to massively cut spending wherever and whenever he and his unpaid tech bros suggest. And there’s no consensus at all as to how Congress will satisfy Trump’s demand for a debt-limit increase, which most Republicans hate like sin itself.

Perhaps the administration’s and Congress’s plans will all come together even as the new president appraises the crowd size at his second inaugural event, but it’s increasingly clear that all the MAGA cackling over the incredible efficiency and harmony underlying Trump 2.0 has been grossly premature. The problems may simply reflect the stubborn resilience of objective reality: It’s really not very easy to remake American government while cutting taxes and deporting millions of immigrants and somehow not denying Americans the benefits and services they want and think they deserve. You can’t “hit the ground running” unless you have a clear idea of where you are going, a realistic sense of feasible outcomes, and a strategy for keeping 77 million Trump voters onboard despite their hallucinatory expectations that he’ll lower grocery prices while ushering in world peace.

Watching Jimmy Carter’s state funeral on January 9 was a sad and sometimes inspiring experience. But given what’s about to happen on January 20, it also served as a reminder about presidential conduct, as I explained at New York:

The state funeral of the 39th president, Jimmy Carter, at the National Cathedral in Washington had all the trappings of the traditional suspension of political warfare in the face of death. Every living ex-president (and most of their vice-presidents) was there, which led to hallucinatory moments like Barack Obama amiably chitchatting with Donald Trump as they sat next to each other in the pews. Among the many eulogies to the Georgian, one that definitely stood out was one written before his own death by the 38th president, Gerald Ford, Carter’s Republican opponent in 1976, who wrote movingly of the partnership and friendship the two men formed during their long post–White House years. It was both sad and touching that the current chief executive, Joe Biden, reached back nearly a half-century to his own endorsement of Carter’s presidential candidacy in the year he defeated Ford.

But it was impossible to forget for a moment that the solemn event that brought this disparate audience together was occurring just 11 days before the re-inauguration of Donal Trump. The incoming president differs in so many respects from Jimmy Carter, and his return to power is a living repudiation of so much of what Carter believed in.

In his own view, Carter’s inveterate truthfulness was his most important personal virtue; “I’ll never lie to you,” he often said when running for president in a country anguished by Tricky Dick Nixon’s administration. Whether or not Carter was able to live up to this lofty commitment to honesty, it contrasts dramatically with Trump’s extremely flexible attitude toward facts and refusal to take personal responsibility for the consequences of his sins (on one infamous occasion, he could not come up with a single thing he had ever done that required divine forgiveness).

Carter’s great legacy in international affairs was his effort to anchor U.S. foreign policy in universal human rights. Trump rejects any standard for foreign policy other than the most naked national self-interest and has gone out of his way to dismiss global standards banning the torture of prisoners of war and military strikes on civilian populations.

Carter had a wonk’s passion for tinkering with government operations to make them more efficient and responsive. Trump is indifferent to the minutiae of governing, and his big reform initiative is to give tech bros Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy license to blow up whole agencies and radically reduce spending as ends in themselves.

In the long arc of political history, Carter is renowned for leading his own southern region out of the darkness of Jim Crow and building a mind-blowing coalition of civil-rights activists and ex-segregationists. Even if you believe Trump is without personal prejudice, he has very clearly made politics safe for a resurgence of racism and has made the pursuit of racial justice and equality a target of legal action and mockery.

As every eulogist at Carter’s funeral emphasized, he was a man of deep and abiding Christian faith, teaching Sunday school back in Plains for many decades. He wasn’t transactional in his religiosity; he took positions on social and cultural issues that led his fellow evangelical Protestants to abandon him and his party, and he led his own congregation out of its traditional denomination when that larger church refused to treat women equally. If Trump has any personal religious convictions, they are largely a secret, and he has formed a highly transactional relationship with conservative Christians, who are forever rationalizing his manifest impiety. Until his wife’s death, Jimmy Carter closed every day reading the Bible in Spanish with Rosalynn. Trump’s relationship with Holy Scripture (other than misquoting it) is mostly limited to hustling expensive Bibles to his devoted followers.

The American presidency is a collection of men with all sorts of varying personalities and backgrounds, and it’s entirely possible someone wildly different from Jimmy Carter is what this country needs. But it’s hard to undertake comparisons of the ex-president who just died and the ex-president who is about to re-enter the White House and see anything other than a devolution in integrity, fidelity to civic and religious traditions, and willingness to work with others peacefully. As Biden succinctly said in his eulogy, Carter’s “enduring attribute” was “character. Character. Character.” What sort of character is Donald Trump?

I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that Donald Trump’s grip on political history is slippery at best. But at New York I went to the trouble of demolishing his claim that the Panama Canal Treaty cost Jimmy Carter the presidency:

In his rambling press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, Donald Trump said some very curious things, to put it mildly. One claim about Jimmy Carter is just wrong. Following up on his recent threats to retake control of the Panama Canal if Panama doesn’t lower shipping fees and eliminate any Chinese involvement in managing the passageway, the president-elect twice asserted that Carter lost his reelection bid in 1980 primarily due to his sponsorship of the treaty that returned the canal to Panama.

I have no idea where Trump got this idea, but it makes little sense. The Panama Canal Treaty, initially negotiated by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, was signed and ushered through the Senate by Carter in April 1978. It was ratified by a 68 to 32 margin, with Republican Senate leader Howard Baker playing a key role (conservative icon William F. Buckley was another key backer of the treaty). Yes, the treaty was initially unpopular, but it became less so after its ratification. And while Ronald Reagan opposed the treaty, and made it a campaign issue against incumbent Republican Ford during the 1978 GOP primaries, it wasn’t a big deal at all by 1980, as Ron Elving recently observed at NPR:

“Reagan remained opposed to the Panama deal but ‘noticeably muted his rhetoric in 1977 when the treaties were finally signed by President Jimmy Carter,’ according to Lou Cannon, the reporter and biographer who covered Reagan more closely and for longer than anyone. In President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, Cannon reports that ‘Reagan’s interest in the Panama Canal declined after the issue had served its political purpose.’ Cannon has written that Reagan’s pollster told him the issue was primarily of interest to hard-core conservatives. By 1980, Reagan had that category locked up.”

If the treaty had been calamitous for Carter, you’d think he would have paid a big price during the 1978 midterm elections that immediately followed the Senate debate on the subject, but in fact, Republican gains in those midterms were modest, despite a lot of other issues bedeviling Democrats, along with a historic realignment that was already underway in Carter’s home region. Indeed, contra Trump’s assumption that foreign policy cost Carter the White House in 1980, there were plenty of more prominent reasons for the outcome aside from the much-discussed and deeply embarrassing hostage crisis. The economy was in terrible shape in 1980, with an unemployment rate of 7.1 percent, an average inflation rate of 12.67 percent, and average home-mortgage rates of 13.74 percent. That alone almost certainly doomed Carter’s reelection. But aside from that, he had to weather a tough primary challenge from Ted Kennedy; a third-party candidacy from ex-Republican John Anderson that wound up taking away more votes from the incumbent than from the challenger; and an inevitable loss of support in southern-inflected parts of the country following his precedent-breaking win in 1976.

Subsequently Reagan did nothing to unravel the Panama Canal Treaty, and by the time the canal was fully turned over to Panama at the end of 1999 (with Carter present), it was a largely noncontroversial event.

For his own mysterious reasons, Trump clearly wants to inflate the significance in American politics of the Panama Canal issue, past and present. Unfortunately, the main participants in the debate over the Canal Treaty aren’t around to dispute his claims. It’s a shame that Trump has chosen to cast a shadow on Carter’s state funeral later this week by mischaracterizing one of his key accomplishments as a career-ending disaster.

As a political history buff I became fascinated with the history of presidential state funerals, and soon realized why Jimmy Carter’s commemoration on January 9 will be unique, so I wrote about it at New York:

There have been 14 official state funerals in Washington for presidents and ex-presidents since the first, for William Henry Harrison, was held in 1841. Until the 1930 funeral of former president (and sitting chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) William Howard Taft, this particular honor was reserved for presidents who died in office. The upcoming January 9 memorial in Washington for the 39th president, Jimmy Carter, will be the fourth ex-presidential state funeral of the 21st century, but the first ever to coincide with the transition of power from one president to another.

Though President-elect Donald Trump regularly mocked Carter as a failed chief executive, his reaction to his predecessor’s death was surprisingly gracious, and he quickly indicated that he would attend the funeral. And as Joe Biden first revealed back in March 2023, Carter asked him to deliver a eulogy. So potentially, this state funeral will mark President Biden’s last big moment in the spotlight and a bit of a prequel to the second Trump inauguration. While Trump skipped Biden’s swearing-in in 2021, Biden will be present on January 20 to formally relinquish the office to his bitter rival.

It could be a moment of transition soon to be forgotten, but there are a number of symbolic implications that might be drawn from this crossing of diverging paths. This will be the first state funeral for a Democratic president since the one in 1973 for Lyndon Johnson, another Oval Office occupant who, like Biden, was pressured into withdrawing from a reelection bid. Could the 2024 election, like that of 1968, represent the beginning of an extended period of Republican domination of presidential elections? (The first was interrupted, as it happens, by Jimmy Carter’s one term in the White House.)

We can’t know that for a while, but we can likely rule out another possibility: that Trump and Biden will use the occasion of the ceremony honoring Carter to bury recent partisan grudges. They could probably both find something nice to say about Carter without offering much of an olive branch to their contemporary political foes. For Trump, Carter was an outsider who tried to shake up the federal government and his own party, while Biden (who actually supported Carter’s 1976 presidential bid as a freshman U.S. senator) can rightly view himself as a fellow centrist Democrat who was nonetheless a fierce partisan warrior. But Biden will have the unique opportunity to stand behind the pulpit of the National Cathedral and pay tribute to his predecessor in a way that adds a punctuation mark to his own one-term presidency.

One thing both Biden and Trump (and, for that matter, the other living ex-presidents, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama) can agree on is to hope that they will enjoy a post-presidency that competes with Carter’s in length, distinction, and the approbation of his fellow citizens. The 39th president certainly left this world more appreciated — and loved — than he was when he left the White House.

As a longtime Georgian and longtime observer of the 39th president, I wrote an obituary of the remarkable Jimmy Carter for New York:

Jimmy Carter was America’s oldest ex-president and had by far the longest former presidency. Indeed, his remarkable life — which ended today after 100 years — can be divided into the stretches before (38 years) and after (43 years) he held public office, with a comparatively short stretch of public service (four in the Georgia state senate, four as governor, and four as president, plus a couple of stints of campaigning) between those two eras. While his ascent to the presidency was in many respects astonishing, his record as a politician was at best mixed: He won one statewide political contest in Georgia and lost one, then won one presidential election and lost one. Assessments of his presidency never quite turned positive in hindsight, and for many years he continued to hold controversial positions on the ultimate hot-button international concern, the Middle East. Most recently, the return of inflation in the early 2020s brought back memories of one of the more painful aspects of his administration’s record.

Yet the man always known by the informal name of Jimmy became and remained a beloved figure in his postpresidency, owing in no small part to his dogged efforts to combat such basic scourges of the human condition as war, disease, political corruption, and homelessness.

Carter was born in 1924 on a large family peanut farm near the hamlet of Plains in southwestern Georgia, the son of an experienced farmer and entrepreneur, Earl, and a trained nurse, Lillian, the remarkable woman who eventually found fame by joining the Peace Corps at age 68 as her son ran for governor. He helped in his family’s agricultural and commercial ventures while growing up. (One, which he was later to revive and expand, was wine-making, unusual for rural Baptists at the time.) Though a dutiful son of the land, Carter longed for travel, and after some preliminary higher education, he gained admission to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1943, graduating in the top 10 percent of his class in 1946, shortly after World War II ended. Around the same time, he married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister’s from Plains, and the couple soon began a family that ultimately included three sons and a daughter.

Carter was well embarked on a naval career (notably serving on the research staff of Hyman Rickover, the “father of the nuclear Navy,” whose hands-on taskmaster management style made a deep impression on the young officer) when his father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, leading Carter to secure a discharge and return to Plains to take over the family farm and businesses. By the end of the 1950s, he was both prosperous and restless, and he became involved in civic and political life. He entered politics at the larger tail end of Jim Crow, when it didn’t take much to get a reputation as a relative liberal on racial matters. Carter quietly qualified by supporting the desegregation of his own Southern Baptist congregation and refusing to join the militantly racist White Citizens’ Council movement when it reached his county. By the time he got to the state senate in 1962 (a judicial intervention aimed at a rival’s fraud forced a second election), he was known as a strong supporter of President John F. Kennedy.

But in Carter’s initial and subsequent campaigns prior to his election as governor, he was hardly a profile in courage on racial matters. In his first gubernatorial bid, in 1966, he cleverly positioned himself between the self-described liberal ex-governor Ellis Arnall and the notorious segregationist Lester Maddox. (I was a kiddie volunteer for that first statewide Carter campaign.) He narrowly missed making a Democratic runoff against Arnall mostly because of Republican crossover votes for Maddox, who was deemed the Democrat that GOP nominee Bo Callaway could most easily defeat. When write-in votes for Arnall forced the election into the legislature under Georgia’s archaic and poorly written Constitution, Carter joined most (but not all) Democrats in casting a party-line vote for the buffoonish racist Maddox. I was shocked to hear my hero’s voice clearly announcing a vote for “Lester G. Maddox” on the live radio broadcast of the balloting, and I did not support his subsequent gubernatorial effort.

Carter barely stopped running between 1966 and 1970, and he confirmed his twin reputations for cautious ambivalence on racial issues and impressive (if cynical) political skills. This time, his principal opponent was former governor Carl Sanders, who had earned the loyalty of Black voters during a relatively enlightened first term. While Carter was quietly wooing some of the same Black civil-rights leaders who would later spearhead his presidential run, his public campaign focused on a populist appeal to white rural and small-town voters who disliked “Cufflinks Carl” for his corporate ties and his racial moderation. Most notoriously, Carter supporters widely distributed photos of Sanders celebrating a victory with Black players from the Atlanta Hawks, the NBA team he partially owned. Carter also went out of his way to express solidarity with Alabama’s George Wallace, who was running an overtly racist campaign in 1970 to recapture power in Montgomery. Carter consolidated conservative white voters and nearly won a majority against Sanders in the first round of primaries, then dispatched the former governor handily in a runoff.

But upon taking office (after a pro forma general-election victory over Republican TV newsman Hal Suit), Carter engineered a sharp left turn on racial issues, making this blunt statement in his 1971 inaugural address:

“I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over … No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”

Thanks to his reputation for quiet decency on racial matters and the strength of his outreach to civil-rights leaders, his campaign demagoguery, not this new departure, was widely viewed as tactical and disposable.

While racially enlightened, Carter’s governorship (limited at the time to a single term) was to a significant extent focused on the dry process issue of government reorganization. He successfully proposed to consolidate 300 state agencies into 22. He made small but politically significant gestures in areas ranging from the equalization of public-education revenues to prison reform and environmental protection.

Meanwhile, like most southern (and not a few northern) politicians in both parties, Carter opposed busing to achieve school desegregation. He nonetheless kept himself in the national political news as an exemplar of “New South” Democratic governors (whose ranks included Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Reubin Askew of Florida, and John West of South Carolina) who were outmaneuvering the old segregationists of their own party while heading off Republican gains in the region that threatened Democrats’ national viability. They were the first truly “national” Democrats in the South since the party had fully abandoned its ancient willingness to support, or at least tolerate, Jim Crow.

Carter’s astonishing rise to the presidency just two years after a meh single term as governor of a Deep South state was a testament to both his unique positioning in a Democratic Party struggling with realignment and the political skills he and his advisers often showed even as they were being mocked as backwoods rubes. Team Carter exploited the emergence of the Iowa caucuses as a pre–New Hampshire nominating contest and out-organized the field there. He then took advantage of national Democrats’ desire for someone to end the threat of Wallace’s presidential candidacy by securing support for one-on-one contests with the Alabaman in the South, which Carter won with the regionally resonant slogan “Don’t send them a message. Send them a president.” He used crucial support from the Atlanta-based King-family network of civil-rights stalwarts to head off attacks on his dubious background on racial matters and turned criticism of his lack of experience into an asset among voters still furious at Watergate-era Washington. Even his Baptist piety became a selling point among both Evangelicals (who had not yet begun their mass exodus to the GOP) and voters inclined to believe his “I’ll never tell you a lie” pledge.

But it was in the general-election contest against Gerald Ford that Carter’s unique regional political appeal became crucial, as I explained in a meditation on the 2020 revival of the southern Democratic Party:

“[Carter] defeated Wallace in most southern primaries and then gained his endorsement, subsequently putting together a mind-bending coalition of Black and conservative white voters united by regional pride (between Andrew and Lyndon Johnson, no president was elected from a state that had been part of the Confederacy). Carter won every state of the former Confederacy (producing huge swings compared with Hubert Humphrey’s performance in 1968 and George McGovern’s in 1972) except Virginia; he won the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri as well as southern-inflected areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania that helped keep those states in the Democratic column.”

It is unlikely that any other Democrat could have won the presidency in 1976, and Carter won by an eyelash. Yet like other regional or ethnic-racial pioneers, his peak of support among the home folks was a thing of the past once he took office. Thus began a troubled four years.

Carter’s one-term presidency had its ups and downs and was rarely stable or predictable. Yes, he inherited a lot of economic trouble from the Nixon and Ford administrations, but his response to double-digit inflation (involving some austerity measures and a lot of austerity talk) divided Democrats, particularly when the Carter administration deprioritized full employment and put in place a Federal Reserve Board chairman (Paul Volcker) determined to use a tight monetary policy to tame inflation, triggering a recession.

This economic turbulence and a closely associated energy crisis (both kicked off by the Arab oil boycott of 1973–74 and a subsequent huge price spike in petroleum products) led Carter to indulge his inner Baptist deacon and sternly lecture Americans about the need for belt-tightening and self-discipline. For one famous week in 1979, he holed up at Camp David summoning advisers and elected officials in preparation for what was later known as the “malaise speech” (though he did not use that term). He struggled regularly with congressional Democrats, who joined with Republicans in sufficient numbers to kill his proposals for a stepped-up federal consumer-protection effort, standby gas-rationing powers, and canceling major water projects he deemed unnecessary. As he had in Georgia, Carter emphasized government-reorganization schemes and did succeed in creating new Cabinet-level Departments of Education and Energy.

But foreign policy was an unusually large focus for Carter as president, leading to some of his biggest triumphs and setbacks. He invested enormous amounts of capital and personal time into engineering the 1978 Camp David Accords, the landmark Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement signed by Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. (It has, extraordinarily, held for more than four decades.) Earlier that year, after a long, tense negotiation, he secured Senate ratification of a treaty to relinquish the Panama Canal to Panama. Beyond establishing any individual bilateral relationships, Carter introduced human rights as a key consideration in U.S. foreign and defense policy, modifying the strict anti-Communist priorities of his immediate predecessors.

Carter’s interactions with Iran characterized the ambiguities of his presidency, helping him beat Ted Kennedy in the 1980 Democratic primaries but putting an exclamation point on his general-election defeat.

Kennedy had been leading Carter two-to-one in primary polls in mid-1979 when the Massachusetts senator all but decided to run; Carter’s combative streak was engaged, and he went out of his way to tell journalists that if Kennedy ran, “I’ll whip his ass.” But a few days before Kennedy’s official announcement, Iranian student revolutionaries took 66 Americans hostage in Tehran in response to Carter’s decision — against the caution of his advisers — to let the deposed Shah of Iran into the U.S. for cancer treatment. The hostage-taking launched a simmering crisis that did not end until the last day of Carter’s presidency. The international emergency did bolster the incumbent’s public standing, particularly among Democrats, and Carter’s “Rose Garden strategy” of running for renomination without holding personal campaign events worked, at least initially. He won 14 of the first 15 caucuses and primaries (losing only Massachusetts), in part by rebuilding his biracial coalition of support in southern and southern-inflected states.

Kennedy made a comeback in the later primaries, and voters grew tired of the hostage crisis (particularly after a rescue attempt went bad in April) and the country’s chronic economic problems. Kennedy won New York, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey, but it wasn’t enough to defeat the incumbent. Still, he didn’t concede until the convention and managed to avoid the traditional arms-raised unity gesture with Carter as the proceedings ended.

Carter had his moments in the general-election contest with Republican Ronald Reagan (and his low points, as when he briefly slipped behind independent candidate John Anderson in the polls), managing to keep the race competitive until late in the campaign despite an assortment of ongoing crises in domestic and foreign policy. There were persistent rumors then and later (and recently, spurred by Carter’s transition to end-of-life care, a confession from an associate of Republican power broker John Connally) of Republican efforts to talk the Iranian regime out of a hostage release prior to the election, but the outcome was probably sealed in any event.

In their one debate, Reagan famously called for voters to make the election a referendum on “the last four years,” and right at the end of the race, Carter’s numbers collapsed. Reagan won by nearly ten points, carrying 44 states.

Although he left office at only 55, Carter never gave a thought to running again. His vice-president, Walter Mondale, won the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination but lost 49 states in the general election, which proved the country was undergoing a partisan realignment. Carter’s strength in the South had masked it earlier, keeping Democratic losses from being much worse. But Carter didn’t brood about his difficulties as president and embraced a simple if robust postpresidential agenda that kept him in good stead for over four decades.

His principal vehicle was the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization created in 1982 in partnership with Atlanta’s Emory University; he and Rosalynn Carter served as co-founders. Its three main international programs have centered on conflict resolution (in areas ranging from North Korea–U.S. nuclear cooperation, to the restoration of democracy in Haiti, to disputes between Sudan and Uganda and between Colombia and Ecuador), election monitoring (in 39 countries), and health initiatives. The center has led efforts to eradicate deadly diseases like Guinea worm and to help diagnose and treat others like river blindness and trachoma. It has also fought to reduce the stigma of mental illness in the U.S. and beyond. In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the Carter Center’s efforts to “find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” He also continued his work for Middle East peace, leading to the one big controversy surrounding his postpresidential years: allegations that he was hostile to Zionism and to Israel itself, which grew stronger with the publication of his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Another postpresidential commitment of Carter’s (and Rosalynn’s) involved Habitat for Humanity, a Georgia-based NGO that had long been doing modest work to build housing for the homeless. The Carters began working with Habitat in 1984 and over the years helped it expand its programs to all 50 states and to 70 countries. We’ve all seen those celebrated photographs of Carter framing up walls. During the 1992 presidential campaign, I was having dinner at the Atlanta political hangout Manuel’s Tavern, and I asked a waiter about all the security loitering around a back room. “Jimmy’s back there showing Clinton and Gore how to drive a nail,” the waiter replied; sure enough, the next day, the three men held a Habitat event nearby and nary a nail was missed.

Yet the nongovernmental entity to which Carter devoted the most years was probably the Baptist Church. He taught Sunday school off and on at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains from its founding in 1977 as a church that welcomed Black worshippers. As the Southern Baptist Convention became militantly conservative in the 1980s and ’90s, Carter eventually broke any identification with the SBC (especially objecting to its refusal to ordain women as ministers) and became a leader of the moderate spinoff group the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Carter’s legacy as a president and a politician is substantial but not entirely settled. He was prescient in a number of policy areas, notably the search for a comprehensive energy strategy and his strong stance on human rights as a touchstone of U.S. foreign policy. He was also a personal diplomat of great courage and skill. From a political perspective, he was the key bridge figure between the Jim Crow era of southern politics and the biracial Democratic coalitions that followed; the Democratic victories in Georgia in 2020 — including the election of a Black U.S. senator — must have gratified him immensely. But Carter also exemplified centrist and even conservative strains in the Democratic Party that persisted while white Democratic racist politics largely vanished.

What made Carter’s postpresidential career so popular, however, was the simple sense, shared far beyond his own region or party, that he was a fundamentally good man who eschewed riches and power for a more humble path to righteousness.

After looking at various Democratic utterances about dealing with Trump 2.0, I wrote up a brief typology for New York:

The reaction among Democrats to Donald Trump’s return to power has been significantly more subdued than what we saw in 2016 after the mogul’s first shocking electoral win. The old-school “resistance” is dead, and it’s not clear what will replace it. But Democratic elected officials are developing new strategies for dealing with the new realities in Washington. Here are five distinct approaches that have emerged, even before Trump’s second administration has begun.

If you can’t beat ’em, (partially) join ’em

Some Democrats are so thoroughly impressed by the current power of the MAGA movement they are choosing to surrender to it in significant respects. The prime example is Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, the onetime fiery populist politician who is now becoming conspicuous in his desire to admit his party’s weaknesses and snuggle up to the new regime. The freshman and one-time ally of Bernie Sanders has been drifting away from the left wing of his party for a good while, particularly via his vocally unconditional backing for Israel during its war in Gaza. But now he’s making news regularly for taking steps in Trump’s direction.

Quite a few Democrats publicly expressed dismay over Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, but Fetterman distinguished himself by calling for a corresponding pardon for Trump over his hush-money conviction in New York. Similarly, many Democrats have discussed ways to reach out to the voters they have lost to Trump. Fetterman’s approach was to join Trump’s Truth Social platform, which is a fever swamp for the president-elect’s most passionate supporters. Various Democrats are cautiously circling Elon Musk, Trump’s new best friend and potential slayer of the civil-service system and the New Deal–Great Society legacy of federal programs. But Fetterman seems to want to become Musk’s buddy, too, exchanging compliments with him in a sort of weird courtship. Fetterman has also gone out of his way to exhibit openness to support for Trump’s controversial Cabinet nominees even as nearly every other Senate Democrat takes the tack of forcing Republicans to take a stand on people like Pete Hegseth before weighing in themselves.

It’s probably germane to Fetterman’s conduct that he will be up for reelection in 2028, a presidential-election year in a state Trump carried on November 5. Or maybe he’s just burnishing his credentials as the maverick who blew up the Senate dress code.

Join ’em (very selectively) to beat ’em

Other Democrats are being much more selectively friendly to Trump, searching for “common ground” on issues where they believe he will be cross-pressured by his wealthy backers and more conventional Republicans. Like Fetterman, these Democrats — including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — tend to come from the progressive wing of the party and have longed chafed at the centrist economic policies advanced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and, to some extent, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They’ve talked about strategically encouraging Trump’s “populist” impulses on such issues as credit-card interest and big-tech regulation, partly as a matter of forcing the new president and his congressional allies to put up or shut up.

So the idea is to push off a discredited Democratic Establishment, at least on economic issues, and either accomplish things for working-class voters in alliance with Trump or prove the hollowness of his “populism.”

Colorado governor Jared Solis has offered a similar strategy of selective cooperation by praising the potential agenda of Trump HHS secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as helpfully “shaking up” the medical and scientific Establishment.

Aim at the dead center

At the other end of the spectrum, some centrist Democrats are pushing off what they perceive as a discredited progressive ascendancy in the party, especially on culture-war issues and immigration. The most outspoken of them showed up at last week’s annual meeting of the avowedly nonpartisan No Labels organization, which was otherwise dominated by Republicans seeking to demonstrate a bit of independence from the next administration. These include vocal critics of the 2024 Democratic message like House members Jared Golden, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Ritchie Torres, and Seth Moulton, along with wannabe 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Josh Gottheimer (his Virginia counterpart, Abigail Spanberger, wasn’t at the No Labels confab but is similarly positioned ideologically).

From a strategic point of view, these militant centrists appear to envision a 2028 presidential campaign that will take back the voters Biden won in 2020 and Harris lost this year.

Cut a few deals to mitigate the damage

We’re beginning to see the emergence of a faction of Democrats that is willing to cut policy or legislative deals with Team Trump in order to protect some vulnerable constituencies from MAGA wrath. This is particularly visible on the immigration front; some congressional Democrats are talking about cutting a deal to support some of Trump’s agenda in exchange for continued protection from deportation of DREAMers. Politico reports:

“The prize that many Democrats would like to secure is protecting Dreamers — Americans who came with their families to the U.S. at a young age and have since been protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created by President Barack Obama in 2012.

“Trump himself expressed an openness to ‘do something about the Dreamers’ in a recent ‘Meet the Press’ interview. But he would almost certainly want significant policy concessions in return, including border security measures and changes to asylum law that Democrats have historically resisted.”

On a broader front, the New York Times has found significant support among Democratic governors to selectively cooperate with the new administration’s “mass deportation” plans in exchange for concessions:

“In interviews, 11 Democratic governors, governors-elect and candidates for the office often expressed defiance toward Mr. Trump’s expected immigration crackdown — but were also strikingly willing to highlight areas of potential cooperation.

“Several balanced messages of compassion for struggling migrants with a tough-on-crime tone. They said that they were willing to work with the Trump administration to deport people who had been convicted of serious crimes and that they wanted stricter border control, even as they vowed to defend migrant families and those fleeing violence in their home countries, as well as businesses that rely on immigrant labor.”

Hang tough and aim for a Democratic comeback

While the Democrats planning strategic cooperation with Trump are getting a lot of attention, it’s clear the bulk of elected officials and activists are more quietly waiting for the initial fallout from the new regime to develop while planning ahead for a Democratic comeback. This is particularly true among the House Democratic leadership, which hopes to exploit the extremely narrow Republican majority in the chamber (which will be exacerbated by vacancies for several months until Trump appointees can be replaced in special elections) on must-pass House votes going forward, while looking ahead with a plan to aggressively contest marginal Republican-held seats in the 2026 midterms. Historical precedents indicate very high odds that Democrats can flip the House in 2026, bringing a relatively quick end to any Republican legislative steamrolling on Trump’s behalf and signaling good vibes for 2028.

It probably won’t matter to Donald Trump how many Democrats show up at his inauguration, but I think it’s important to distinguish between honoring the wishes of voters and fighting like hell once the 47th president is in office, and I wrote about that at New York.

Democrats and others who fear or despise what Donald Trump has in store for us over the next four years have many decisions to make about how to cope with the new regime. There are plenty of legitimate reasons (especially given the plans and appointments he has already revealed) for a posture of total opposition. Something approaching an actual “resistance” may arise once the 47th president takes office and it all becomes very real.

But prior to January 20, it’s all potential rather than actual, which is one reason the talk of Democratic elected officials boycotting the inauguration, as USA Today reports some are considering, seems like a bad idea, one that signals the opposition’s weakness, not its resolution:

“Should Democrats skip the inauguration, as more than 60 members of Congress did in 2017, or would it be wiser for them to attend and show that after a divisive contest, America’s democratic norms remain secure? After all, Trump didn’t attend Biden’s inauguration after the now-president defeated him in 2020.”

Amid all the conflicting takes on how Donald Trump won the presidency after losing it in 2020, there’s a strong consensus that gains among Latino voters mattered a great deal. I examined this CW at New York:

Definite judgements about how the 2024 presidential election turned out should await voter-file based data that won’t be available for some time. But it’s pretty clear one of the biggest and most counter-intuitive shifts from 2020 was Donald Trump’s gains among Latino voters. Yes, there’s a lot of controversy over the exact size of that shift. Edison Research’s exit polls (which have drawn considerable criticism in the past for allegedly poor Latino voter samples) showed Kamala Harris winning Latinos by a spare 51 to 46 percent margin, while Edison’s major competitor, the Associated Press VoteCast, showed Harris’s margin at a somewhat more robust 55 to 43 percent. Other estimates range up to the 62 to 37 percent win claimed for Harris in the American Electorate Voter Poll.

But most takes showed sizable Republican gains from 2020, and for that matter, Trump did measurably better among Latinos in 2020 than in 2016 (Pew’s validated voter studies showed Trump winning 28 percent in 2016 and 38 percent in 2020). As Equis Research puts it, “this looks and sounds like a realignment.” And while close elections lend themselves to exaggerated focus on specific voter groups, the size and potential future magnitude of the Latino vote make it a natural source of deep concern for Democrats and optimism for Republicans. A New York Times analysis of the startling losses in vote share by Democrats in urban core areas in 2024 concluded that the most consistent pattern was significant Latino populations, which also showed major Republican gains in non-urban areas as well.

To state the obvious, it’s surprising that a politician so associated with nativist rhetoric and policies as Donald Trump is setting records for support in what has traditionally been a Democratic “base” constituency. Is this a trend that would have occurred without Trump leading the GOP, and if so, could it actually intensify once he’s left office for good?

It’s important to understand that this isn’t the first time a pro-GOP Latino “wave” seemed to be developing. While there was immense controversy over the exact numbers (in part because of uniquely flawed exit polls in that particular year), George W. Bush appears to have won about 40 percent of this vote, beating Ronald Reagan’s earlier record of 37 percent in his 1984 reelection landslide. According to the more reliable exit polls in subsequent elections, the GOP share of the Latino vote dropped to 31 percent in 2008 and then to 27 percent in 2012. Some reasons for this reversal of the trend that appeared in 2004 weren’t that hard to discern: the Great Recession that appeared late in Bush’s second term hit Latino households really hard, even as Republicans retreated rapidly from Bush’s support for comprehensive immigration reform (by 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney was promoting policies to make life so unpleasant for undocumented immigrants that they would “self-deport”).

But it’s possible that what we are seeing now is the resumption of a slow drift towards the GOP among Latinos that was temporarily interrupted by the Great Recession and a nativist uprising among white Republicans. Whatever unhappiness Latinos felt towards Trump’s immigration views was pretty clearly offset by economic concerns, especially among younger Latino men, who broke towards Trump most sharply. As happened during the Great Recession, the economy mattered most, and the combination of inflation (especially in housing costs) with tight credit eroded already-thin Democratic loyalties. As the above-mentioned Times analysis showed, defections to Trump happened all across the landscape of the Latino electorate, not just among more traditionally Republican-prone groups as Cuban Americans or South Americans. The question as to whether this is a party accomplishment rather than a personal accomplishment by Trump is an open one; Democrats did significantly better among Latinos in down-ballot races in 2024.

A general trend towards a more politically diverse Latino voting population makes some intuitive sense. As former immigrants slowly give way to native-born citizens, particularly those who are entering the middle-class en masse, it’s logical that identification with “the party of immigrants” will decline. Latinos who embrace conservative evangelical–and especially hyper-conservative pentecostal–religious practices also has helped intensify right-leaning cultural attitudes. We may never return to the days of reliable two-to-one Democratic advantages in this community, particularly as young voters who are especially alienated from traditional party loyalties move into the electorate.

While Democrats should be worried about the future of Latino voting behavior, Republicans have no reason for complacency. It’s now Trump and the GOP who are fully responsible for economic conditions which could turn out to be much worse than vague positive memories of the first Trump administration might suggest. And while (as some polling indicates) Latino citizens may have a negative attitude towards the recent surge of migrants that has become so central to Trump’s grip on his MAGA base, it’s less clear the mass deportation regime Trump has pledged to undertake immediately is going to go over well among Latinos, even those who voted for him. A recent Pew survey showed that Latinos were significantly less supportive of a major deportation program than other voters. And if the Trump administration pursues deportation round-ups in a cruel and ham-handed way (which elements of Trump’s base would welcome as a virtue rather than as a vice), or by methods that affect Latino legal immigrants and native citizens (most likely via ethnic profiling by law enforcement officials), we could see a pretty significant Latino backlash.

In other words, while some Latino trend towards the GOP may be inevitable all things being equal, it’s hardly guaranteed and could be sharply reversed. For their part Democrats need to get more serious about Latino voter outreach (particularly among young men) and identify (and learn to explain!) an economic agenda that prioritizes the practical needs of middle-class folk from every background.

 

With Senate confirmation hearings of Trump’s motley crew of Cabinet-level nominees, one issue Democrats will need to confront right away is when and whether the appointees’ often-exotic religious views are an appropriate subject for discussion. I offered some simple guidelines at New York:

Amid all the hotly disputed allegations that he has a history of excessive drinking and inappropriate (or even abusive) behavior toward women, Donald Trump’s defense-secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, has another potential problem that’s just now coming into view: His religious beliefs are a tad scary.

Early reports on Hegseth’s belligerent brand of Christianity focused on a tattoo he acquired that sported a Latin slogan associated with the medieval Crusaders (which led to him being flagged as a potential security problem by the National Guard, in which he served with distinction for over a decade). But as the New York Times reports, the tattoo is the tip of an iceberg that appears to descend into the depths of Christian nationalism:

“’Voting is a weapon, but it’s not enough,’ [Hegseth] wrote in a book, American Crusade, published in May 2020. ‘We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must …’

“In his book, Mr. Hegseth also offered a nod to the prospect of future violence: ‘Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.’”

His words aside, Hegseth has chosen to associate himself closely with Doug Wilson, an Idaho-based Christian-nationalist minister with a growing educational mission, notes the Times:

“[After moving to Tennessee two years ago] the Hegseth family joined Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a small church opened in 2021 as part of the growing Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. The denomination was co-founded by Doug Wilson, a pastor based in Moscow, Idaho; his religious empire now includes a college, a classical school network, a publishing house, a podcast network, and multiple churches, among other entities …

“In his writings, Mr. Wilson has argued that slavery ‘produced in the South a genuine affection between the races,’ that homosexuality should be a crime, and that the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote was a mistake. He has written that women should not ordinarily hold political office because ‘the Bible does say that when feminine leadership is common, it should be reckoned not as a blessing but as a curse …’

“Mr. Hegseth told [a] Christian magazine in Nashville that he was studying a book by Mr. Wilson; on a podcast Mr. Hegseth said that he would not send his children to Harvard but would send them to Mr. Wilson’s college in Idaho.”

All this Christian-nationalist smoke leads to the fiery question of whether Hegseth’s religious views are fair game for potential confirmation hearings. Would exploration of his connections with a wildly reactionary religious figure like Doug Wilson constitute the sort of “religious test … as a qualification to any office or public trust” that is explicitly banned by Article VI of the U.S. Constitution? It’s a good and important question that could come up with respect to other Trump nominees, given the MAGA movement’s cozy relationship with theocratic tendencies in both conservative-evangelical and traditionalist-Catholic communities.

Actually, the question of the boundary between a “religious test” and maintenance of church-state separation came up conspicuously during the first year of Trump’s earlier presidency in confirmation hearings for the then-obscure Russell Vought, whom Trump nominated to serve as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (he later became director of OMB, the position to which Trump has again nominated him for the second term). Bernie Sanders seized upon a Vought comment defending his alma mater, Wheaton College, for sanctions against a professor who said that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.” Sanders suggested that showed Vought was an Islamophobic bigot, while Vought and his defenders (included yours truly) argued that the man’s opinion of the credentials of Muslims for eternal life had nothing to do with his duties as a prospective public servant.

This does not, to be clear, mean that religious expressions when they actually do have a bearing on secular governance should be off-limits in confirmation hearings or Senate votes. If, for example, it becomes clear that Hegseth believes his Christian faith means echoing his mentor Doug Wilson’s hostility to women serving in leadership positions anywhere or anytime, that’s a real problem and raising it does not represent a “religious test.” If this misogyny was limited to restrictions on women serving in positions of religious leadership, that would be another matter entirely.

More generally, if nominees for high executive office follow their faith in adjudging homosexuality or abortion as wicked, it’s only germane to their fitness for government offices if they insist upon imposing those views as a matter of public policy. Yes, there is a conservative point of view that considers any limitation on faith-based political activism in any arena as a violation of First Amendment religious-liberty rights. But those who think this way also tend to disregard the very idea of church-state separation as a First Amendment guarantee.

Critics of Christian nationalism in the Trump administration need to keep essential distinctions straight and avoid exploring the religious views of nominees if they are truly private articles of faith directed to matters of the spirit, not secular laws. It’s likely there will be plenty of examples of theocratic excesses among Trump nominees as Senate confirmation hearings unfold. But where potential holders of high offices respect the lines between church and state, their self-restraint commands respect as well.