The nation would love to know what on Earth Donald Trump and Barack Obama were talking about.
A prolonged, jovial exchange between the bitter enemies encapsulated the compelling theater of the state funeral for former President Jimmy Carter — 11 days before the 45th president is inaugurated as the 47th.
The service, in Washington’s National Cathedral, was a paean for a humble man from a tiny Georgia town who rose to great power — a peanut farmer, nuclear physicist, submariner, husband, father, civil rights pioneer, president and Nobel laureate who died, at age 100, last month.
But it was also a multi-layered melodrama of the nation’s fraught political moment, with vicious rivalries leavened for an hour or so by the dignity of mourning.
Presidential rivals thrown together
In a rare spectacle, the fraternity of former presidents was all together. The cathedral’s front two rows contained the tumultuous stories, feuds and frictions of the last 30 years when American politics tore the nation apart.
Last to arrive was President Joe Biden, holding hands with first lady Jill Biden, in one of the last official acts of his presidency. The first couple sat with Vice President Kamala Harris, who failed in her bid to succeed him, and her stone-faced husband Douglas Emhoff. Behind Biden, and just to the left, was Trump, who effectively ended his career in their sole debate, which exposed the president’s diminished capacity. Trump then ended Harris’ 2024 White House dreams.
Behind Harris sat Hillary Clinton, whom Trump also kept from becoming the first woman president and breaking the hardest, highest ceiling in American politics. The former secretary of state, New York senator and first lady was with her husband Bill Clinton, now the last living president of the 20th century.
There was a palpable sense of a political era closing since almost all of Carter’s foreign counterparts in his presidency, which lasted just one term from 1977 to 1981, are already long gone. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – a frequent Trump target who just announced his resignation – offered one link to the past. He is the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who was prime minister for much of Carter’s presidency.
Clinton sat next to former President George W. Bush on a rare visit to Washington for the Republican. Bush offered another parable of the passage of time. Now 78, he lacks the fiddly, towel-snapping energy of his 2000 campaign. You can take the boy out of the frat but not the frat out of the boy; Bush greeted his successor, Obama, with a manly belly tap.
Obama got what his fellow presidents might consider the short straw — the spot next to Trump. But he didn’t take refuge in conversation with former first lady Laura Bush to his right. He was soon smiling broadly as he chatted with the incoming president, whom he campaigned vigorously against last fall.
Obama is a gracious man, and people who have spent time with Trump say that despite his public spite, he’s entertaining and funny in private. So maybe they were just yukking it up. But their history and open public disdain made their interaction one of the most extraordinary moments in a vicious political age.
After all, Trump rose to power with a racist and false conspiracy about Obama’s birthplace, and he still casts aspersions on the 44th president’s nationality and faith by pointing out his middle name is Hussein at rallies. Obama sees Trump as the antithesis of everything for which America stands. Only a few months ago, at the Democratic National Convention, he lampooned Trump as a “78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago.” He lambasted “the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes” and compared Trump to a neighbor who runs his leaf blower outside your window. “From a neighbor, that’s exhausting. From a president, it’s just dangerous.”
There’s still no love lost. But since the last 15 years have been a duel between Obamaism and Trumpism, perhaps the country can take solace that they can still at least talk to one another. As to the subject of their conversation — who knows? Perhaps it was golf, which may be the only obsession they share.
There was one notable absence from the ranks of the first families: Michelle Obama, who may find public magnanimity more difficult than her husband and branded Trump a misogynistic racist in her own Democratic convention speech.
A poignant meeting between Gore and Pence
Behind the presidents were the vice presidents, Dan Quayle, Al Gore and Mike Pence, who greeted Trump with a stilted handshake that was a legacy of their split when the once-and-future president tried to steal the 2020 election.
There was a poignant moment when Pence and Gore — two vice presidents who chose the Constitution and put the country first to move on from disputed elections — stood and chatted. The indignities and thwarted ambitions of the number twos were on display after the presidents left the service first with VIP treatment and the VEEPs were left waiting to exit with the rest of the public. They were stuck in the third pew of the cathedral and metaphorically in American public life, just out of tantalizing reach of the privileges of the presidency.
There was another ex-president who paid homage to Carter, in spirit and word at least. Former President Gerald Ford, whom Carter ejected from the White House in the 1976 election and who died in 2006, had written a eulogy to a rival who became a great friend, which was read by his son Steven.
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In his final address to the nation, Gerald Ford wrote that even the fierce animosities of politics faded after he and Carter learned that “political defeat and writing can also be liberating if it frees you to discuss topics that aren’t necessarily consistent with short-term political popularity.”
Steven Ford turned to Carter’s children after reading the eulogy and told them: “God did a good thing when he made your dad.”
All eyes were on Trump
But not even death can quell political ill will. And state funerals are a Washington ritual that offers a final chance to settle old scores and to write the history of a presidential administration. Carter’s former domestic policy chief Stuart Eizenstat delivered a gem that applies to each of the former presidents — and Biden especially. “The test of American presidents is not the number of years they serve, but the duration of their accomplishments.”
Carter was a one-term president, but his achievements — including the Camp David Middle East peace accord and early embrace of environmentalism — have been lauded since his death as presidency that was often mocked gets a reassessment.
Given Trump’s impending inauguration and his legacy of trashing presidential norms, public courtesies and constitutional guardrails, the funeral honoring Carter, who was renowned for supporting global democracy and piety, was always going to take on an allegorical dimension.
Jabs at Trump were less overt than those aimed toward him at former Arizona Sen. John McCain’s funeral in 2018. But they were still unmistakable.
Ted Mondale, the son of Carter’s late Vice President Walter Mondale, read a remembrance prepared by his father that recalled how he and Carter had together tried to sum up their presidency in their final days in office and came up with: “We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace.”
It would be hard to apply two-thirds of that epigram to Trump after his first term. As Mondale praised Carter for his early recognition of global warming, a force that is fueling murderous fires in Los Angeles, Trump, a climate change denier, stared at his order of service as he sat beside future first lady Melania Trump.
A state funeral is a gathering of the Washington clans, a convocation of the very establishment that Trump has pledged to destroy in his second term. Carter was not a clubbable man and his self-conscious piety was sometimes an irritant for his successors. He was the uneasiest member of the ex-president’s club apart from Trump.
But in death, he has become an avatar for the values that many of Trump’s critics see as under threat as his new term dawns.
The living president who was closest to Carter was Biden, who endorsed his 1976 presidential run as a young senator and who has delivered veiled rebukes to Trump in his last weeks in power. Given Biden’s antipathy to his predecessor and successor, it was hard not to see deliberate criticism in his eulogy.
“We have an obligation to give hate no safe harbor. And to stand up to what my dad used to say is the greatest sin of all, the abuse of power,” Biden said. “We’re all fallible. But it’s about asking ourselves, are we striving to do things, the right things? What value – what are the values that animate our spirit? Do we operate from fear or hope? Ego or generosity? Do we show grace?”
State funerals highlight the aging of public figures with whom the country lived when they were more youthful, poignantly marking time in America’s story.
The pain of mortality was etched across the face of Amy Carter, now in middle age but whom older Americans remember as a carefree schoolgirl growing up in the White House.
And in one of the most moving moments of a ceremony embroidered from the country’s often painful national fable, the Rev. Andrew Young, who was with Martin Luther King Jr. when he was assassinated, sat beside Carter’s casket. He recalled how the ex-president began his century of life growing up in a mostly Black area of rural Georgia and had been a courageous advocate for racial equality in his home state and in the White House.
Young, Carter’s former ambassador to the United Nations, read from scripture to end a service that must have been especially poignant for the former presidents, who, in a macabre sense, were getting a preview of their own funerals.
The achievements, regrets, thwarted ambitions and acrimonies that still resonate in that presidential pew won’t count for much at the end. Sooner or later, each of them will end up in the nave, just like Carter, in a casket draped in the American flag.
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