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The first two banks of the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter should be an acrimony diagram.
Former President Barack Obama sat next to the president-elect Donald Trump. Obama said Trump was unfit to serve in the White House, and Trump repeatedly and falsely questioned Obama’s U.S. citizenship.
Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff sat across from Trump, even though they are still suffering from his November election defeat.
Former President George W. Bush sat in front of former Vice President Al Gore, who received more votes than Bush in 2000 but had to accept his electoral defeat.
Bush did not have the opportunity to speak with Michelle Obama, with whom he developed a friendship, because the former first lady did not attend the funeral.
Gore sat next to former Vice President Mike Pence, whose strained relationship with Trump, just a stone’s throw away, cost Pence his place in the GOP.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton might also be exasperated by sitting next to Trump, whose victory over her in 2016 she never fully accepted.
And President Joe Biden, sitting across the aisle from the front bench, still thinks he could have beaten Trump, even though he dropped out of the 2024 race under pressure from his fellow Democrats — apparently including him. Obama.
The office of president, assigned by voters after an election, is by nature contradictory.
But this gathering of current and former presidents to mark the passing of one of their own offered an important lesson in how to put politics in its place.
It turns out that Carter and former President Gerald Ford, the man he defeated to win the White House, became close friends after Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980.
They mutually agreed in a phone call to deliver eulogies at their respective funerals, although only one of them, naturally, would be able to keep that promise. Ford died in December 2006, and Carter spoke at his predecessor’s funeral in January 2007.
Ford’s son, actor Steven Ford, delivered his father’s prepared speech at Carter’s funeral, and it contained a touching message about how a cross-party friendship developed between the two men who were once the most powerful person on the planet.
“By the fate of a brief season, Jimmy Carter and I were rivals, but for the many wonderful years that followed, friends bonded us as there have not been two presidents since John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.” , said Steven Ford while reading his father’s eulogy.
“It is because of our shared values that Jimmy and I respected each other as adversaries even before we cherished each other as dear friends.”
It can be hard to believe that people who fight against each other, let alone presidents, can develop a friendship.
“There is an old belief that two presidents in a room is one too many,” Ford said, noting that he was worried about sharing a flight with Carter to the funeral of assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981.
“It was somewhere across the Atlantic that Jimmy and I forged a friendship that transcended politics,” Ford said. “We then decided to exercise one of the privileges of a former president, forgetting that one of us had ever said harsh words about the other.”
They shared “our experiences discovering that there is indeed life after the White House.”
It was around this time that Obama could be seen nodding as he shared a few words with Trump. They were also seen speaking before the service.
Watch Trump and Obama talk before Carter’s funeral
Ford said he and Carter agreed that the United States should more directly address “the Palestinian question” in order to work toward lasting peace in the Middle East. This ruffled feathers in Washington, according to Ford’s remarks written many years ago. This also looks like a warning today that was not sufficiently heeded by the US government.
Ford said he and Carter learned during their post-presidencies that “political defeat…can also be liberating if it frees you to discuss topics that are not necessarily consistent with short-term political popularity.”
We should not expect a similar friendship to develop between Obama and Trump or Trump and Biden or the Clintons and Trump, although they attended his wedding to Melania Trump before Trump entered politics. Carter and Ford, like Clinton, W. Bush, and Obama, adhered to the philosophy of retiring from day-to-day politics after leaving the White House. Trump, until now an anomaly, never left the political fight and fought his way back to the White House. And he still feels animosity, at least publicly, toward Obama and Biden.
But the Constitution prohibits Trump from running in a fourth presidential election, meaning he will officially join the club of former presidents in four years starting January 20. Maybe then he and the presidents who came before and after him will find some sort of peace.