Donald Trump joins visitors paying respects to Jimmy Carter
9 January 2025, 01:34
The president-elect has often criticised his predecessor who is lying in state ahead of his funeral in Washington on Thursday.
President-elect Donald Trump visited the Capitol Rotunda in Washington on Wednesday to pay his respects to Jimmy Carter as the 39th president lies in state ahead of his funeral on Thursday.
Mr Carter was often the target of Mr Trump’s derision during his 2024 campaign and the president-elect has renewed his critique of the Georgia Democrat this week for ceding control of the Panama Canal to its home country when he was president more than four decades ago.
Mr Trump, who plans to attend the funeral at Washington National Cathedral, played it straight on Capitol Hill, walking sombrely into the rotunda with his wife Melania and pausing in front of Carter’s flag-draped casket, which is resting atop the Lincoln catafalque and stands surrounded by a military honour guard.
Throughout his successful 2024 campaign, Mr Trump lampooned President Joe Biden and Mr Carter and played up Republican caricatures of the former president.
“Jimmy Carter is happy because he had a brilliant presidency compared to Biden,” Mr Trump said, even using some version of the attack when former first lady Rosalynn Carter was on her deathbed in 2023 and on Mr Carter’s 100th birthday on October 1, 2024.
On Tuesday, the day the former president’s remains arrived in Washington, Mr Trump added: “I liked him as a man. I disagreed with his policies. He thought giving away the Panama Canal was a good thing.”
Members of Congress, Capitol Hill staffers and former speaker Kevin McCarthy also joined the long line of mourners. Lynda Robb and Luci Baines Johnson, the daughters of President Lyndon Johnson, paid their respects as well.
Mr Carter, the longest-lived US president, died on December 29 at the age of 100.
A US Naval Academy graduate, submarine officer and peanut farmer before entering politics, Mr Carter won the White House in 1976 as an outsider in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate.
He endured a rocky four years of economic unrest and international crises that ended with his defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan. But he also lived long enough to see historians reassess his presidency more charitably than voters did in 1980, and the national rites of a state funeral afford him a notable counter to the often testy relationship he had with Washington during his four years in the Oval Office.
“President Carter was the governor of the great state of Georgia when I was born,” said Lyn Leverett, among the people who waited in below-freezing weather on Wednesday. “So he’s been around my, you know, my whole entire being. And I just want to pay my respects to a decent person.”
Kim James, a Maryland resident, said she had yet to start school when Mr Carter was elected and thinks of him more as the white-haired former president who fought disease and advocated for democracy in the developing world and built homes for Habitat for Humanity in the US and abroad.
“He cared about other people,” she said, adding that political leaders today should work harder to replicate that example. “That selflessness — it always stood out.”
Official ceremonies this week also have remembered Mr Carter’s religious convictions, long public service and decades of humanitarian work beyond what he accomplished in politics.
Vice President Kamala Harris, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune eulogised the former president at the Capitol, when his remains first arrived in the rotunda.
Mr Carter’s body will remain at the Capitol until Thursday morning, when he is transported to Washington National Cathedral for a state funeral that begins at 10am local time.
Mr Biden, a long-time Carter ally, will deliver a eulogy. Other living former presidents, including Mr Trump, are expected to attend.
After the funeral, the Boeing 747 that is Air Force One when a sitting president is aboard will carry Mr Carter and his family back to Georgia.
An invitation-only funeral will be held at Maranatha Baptist Church in tiny Plains, Georgia, where he taught Sunday School for decades after leaving office.
Mr Carter will be buried next to his wife in a plot near the home they built before his first state Senate campaign in 1962 and where they lived out their lives with the exception of four years in the Georgia Governor’s Mansion and four years in the White House.
