Politics

Carter Never Took to Washington. The Feeling Was Mutual.

Published

10 months ago

January 7, 2025

Carter Never Took to Washington. The Feeling Was Mutual.

Former President Jimmy Carter is set to arrive in Washington on Tuesday to be honored in death as the city never truly honored him in life.

That he will end his long story with a pomp-and-circumstance visit to the nation’s capital is a nod to protocol not partiality, a testament to the rituals of the American presidency rather than a testimonial to the time he presided in the citadel of power.

To put it more bluntly, Mr. Carter and Washington did not exactly get along. More than any president in generations before him, the peanut farmer from Georgia was a genuine outsider when he took occupancy of the white mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — and determinedly, stubbornly, proudly remained so.

He never cared for the culture of the capital, never catered to its mandarins and doyens, never bowed to its conventions. The city, in turn, never cared for him and his “Georgian mafia,” dismissing them as a bunch of cocky rednecks from the hinterlands who did not know what they were doing. Other outsider presidents eventually acclimated to Washington. Not Mr. Carter. And by his own admission, it would cost him.

“I don’t know which was worse — the Carter crowd’s distrust and dislike of unofficial Washington or Washington’s contempt for the new guys in town from Georgia,” recalled Gregory B. Craig, a longtime lawyer and fixture in Washington who served in two other Democratic administrations. “I do know it was there on Day 1.”

Between the two camps, the blend of piety, pettiness, jealousy and condescension proved toxic. It was not partisan — Mr. Carter’s most profound differences were with fellow Democrats. But the litany of slights and snubs on both sides was long and lingering. Everyone remembered the phone call that went unreturned, the invitation that never came, the project that was not approved, the appointment that was not offered.

Mr. Carter, after all, had run against Washington when he came out of nowhere to win the presidency in 1976 and unlike others who did that, he really meant it. He vaulted to office as the antidote to Watergate, Vietnam and other national setbacks. He had not come to town to become a creature of it.

He saw the demands of the Washington power structure as indulgent and pointless. He had no interest in dinner at the home of Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, and aides like Hamilton Jordan, his chief of staff, and Jody Powell, his press secretary, radiated his disregard.

“Carter’s state funeral in Washington is full of ironies,” said Kai Bird, who titled his 2021 biography of Mr. Carter “The Outlier” for a reason. “He really was an outsider running against the Washington establishment. And when he improbably entered the Oval Office, he declined more than one dinner invitation from the Georgetown set.”

In their conversations for the book, Mr. Bird added, “he later told me he thought that was a mistake. But he preferred pizza and beer with Ham Jordan and Jody Powell — or working late into the night.”

As E. Stanly Godbold Jr., the author of a two-volume biography of Mr. Carter and the first lady Rosalynn Carter, put it: “Carter arrived at the White House virtually unbeholden to anyone except Rosalynn, his family and those millions of people who had voted for him. He had a free hand, within the limits of the Constitution and the presidency, to do as he wished.”

Or so he thought. But what Mr. Carter saw as principled, Washington saw as naïve and counterproductive. The framers conceived a system with checks and balances, but historically it has been lubricated by personal relationships, favors, horse trading and socializing.

“When it came to the politics of Washington, D.C., he never really understood how the system worked,” Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., the House speaker, wrote in his memoir. Mrs. Graham wrote in hers that “Jimmy Carter was one of those outsider presidents who found it difficult to find the right modus operandi for Washington.”

This was an era of giants in Washington, the likes of whom do not exist today. It was a time when titans of law, lobbying, politics and journalism like Joseph A. Califano Jr., Edward Bennett Williams, Ben Bradlee and Art Buchwald would meet for lunch every Tuesday at the Sans Souci to hash over the latest events. Mr. Carter was a frequent topic of discourse, and not always lovingly so.

Mr. Carter got off to a rough start with Mr. O’Neill, a necessary ally to pass any agenda. Shortly after the election, Mr. Carter visited the speaker but seemed dismissive of Mr. O’Neill’s advice about working with Congress, saying that if lawmakers did not go along, he could go over their heads to appeal to voters. “Hell, Mr. President, you’re making a big mistake,” Mr. O’Neill recalled replying.

It got worse when Mr. O’Neill asked for tickets for his family to attend an inaugural eve gala at the Kennedy Center only to discover that his relatives were seated far off in the balcony. Mr. O’Neill called Mr. Jordan the next day to yell at him. He nicknamed the chief of staff “Hannibal Jerkin.” In his memoir, Mr. O’Neill complained that Mr. Jordan and other Carter aides were “amateurs” who “came to Washington with a chip on their shoulder and never changed.”

But if they had a chip, it was fueled by plenty of patronizing quips mocking the Carter team’s Southern roots, including cartoons in the paper portraying them as hayseeds. It did not help that Mr. Carter arrived in a city full of politicians who thought they should have been the one to win in 1976, not this nobody from Georgia.

Mr. Carter styled himself as a man of the people from the start by getting out of his limousine during the inaugural parade to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. He initially banned the playing of “Hail to the Chief” when he entered a room and sold Sequoia, the presidential yacht often used in the past to woo key congressional leaders.

He took it as a badge of honor to do things that were not politically expedient, like cutting off water projects important to lawmakers trying to deliver for their districts or forcing them to vote on an unpopular treaty turning over the Panama Canal. It did not go over well either when Washington concluded that he did not fight hard enough for Ted Sorensen, the old John F. Kennedy hand, to become C.I.A. director or when he fought with Mr. Califano, the Washington powerhouse serving as secretary of health, education and welfare.

“I believe President Carter tried to make peace when he came into office,” said Chris Matthews, who was a speechwriter for him before going on to work for Mr. O’Neill and then embarking on a long career in television journalism. But “Carter told me he should have done more work getting control of the Democratic Party.” And Mr. Matthews noted that “his challenge in Washington derived from odd places,” like the squabble over the gala seats.

The spats had consequences, both legislatively and politically. Ultimately, he got a lot of his bills through Congress, but not all and not easily. And eventually, he was challenged for the party nomination in 1980 by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a challenge that fell short but damaged him for the fall contest that he would lose to former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California.

“His poor relationships with Democrats in both the House and the Senate hindered his ability to drive his agenda through Congress,” said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian at the Ronald Reagan Institute. “In addition, those poor relations hurt his reputation in Washington, as many Democratic members who would ordinarily advocate for the administration in the press were less willing to do so.”

Mr. Carter did not naturally take to the schmoozing that comes with politics. At one point, an aide persuaded him to invite a couple of important senators to play tennis at the White House. He consented, but as soon as the set was done, he headed back into the mansion without chit-chatting or inviting them in for a drink. “You said to play tennis with them, and I did,” Mr. Carter later explained to the disappointed aide.

“Carter didn’t like politics, period,” said Douglas Brinkley, the author of “The Unfinished Presidency,” about Mr. Carter’s much-lauded humanitarian work after leaving office. “And he didn’t like politicians.”

After an official dinner, Mr. Carter would be quick to take his leave. “He would be curt,” Mr. Brinkley said. “He would just get up because he had work to do. He never developed any Washington friendships.”

Mr. Williams was a prime example of a missed opportunity. A founder of the law firm Williams & Connolly, owner of the team then called the Washington Redskins and later of the Baltimore Orioles, and treasurer of the Democratic Party, Mr. Williams was a quintessential capital insider.

But he felt shunned by Mr. Carter. Mr. Williams recalled meeting the future president at the 1976 convention and all he got was “a wet flounder” of a handshake. He was irked that Mr. Carter never came to the Alfalfa Dinner, one of the most exclusive black-tie events on Washington’s social circuit. “Carter’s a candy-ass,” Mr. Williams groused to the president of Georgetown University, according to “The Man to See,” by Evan Thomas.

Only after a couple of years in Washington did the Carter team finally seek Mr. Williams’s help, in this case to quash negative media reports involving Mr. Jordan. When he succeeded, he was invited to a state dinner and Mr. Carter later came to sit in Mr. Williams’s box for a football game at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. But Mr. Williams never warmed to Mr. Carter and joined a futile last-minute effort to thwart his nomination at the convention in 1980.

Mr. Carter never warmed to Washington either, calling it an island “isolated from the mainstream of our nation’s life.” After losing re-election, he grappled with his distant relationship with the capital. In “White House Diary,” he cast it largely as a matter of social butterflies resentful of his diffidence rather than something larger.

Rosalynn Carter, Mr. Powell and others, he wrote, had criticized him because “neither I nor my key staff members participated in Washington’s social life,” much to his detriment. “I am sure this apparently aloof behavior drove something of a wedge between us and numerous influential cocktail party hosts,” he wrote. “But I wasn’t the first president to object to this obligation.”

He wrote that he and Mrs. Carter had resolved to avoid going out regularly when he was governor of Georgia “and for better or worse, I never had any intention of changing this approach when we moved into the White House.”

At this point, of course, all of that is ancient history. Washington’s focus on Tuesday will be on the successes of Mr. Carter’s presidency, the inspiration of his post-presidency and the decency of his character. He will be brought by horse-drawn caisson to the Capitol and lie in state. He will be honored at Washington National Cathedral on Thursday.

No matter how Washington feels, it has a way of putting on a great funeral.

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Politics

White House East Wing: See Before Trump’s Renovations, and Plans for His Ballroom

Published

10 minutes ago

October 23, 2025

Press Room

White House East Wing: See Before Trump’s Renovations, and Plans for His Ballroom

When President Trump first announced his plans for a ballroom at the White House, he promised a light touch on the structure. Now the East Wing is slated to be completely torn down.

The top diagram of the White House is based on an aerial view from Google Earth. In the bottom diagram is a photograph of a physical model taken by Doug Mills. The New York Times

During an Oval Office meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Trump showed off a model of the White House with the new ballroom, along with recent drawings of the ballroom itself. On the other end of the White House grounds, demolition of the East Wing continued.

Jiawei Wang/The New York Times

Mr. Trump said that to build the ballroom properly, the existing structure had to come down, despite his previous statements. The East Wing housed the White House visitors office and offices for the first lady and her staff.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Much is still unknown about the renovation process and what the final ballroom will look like, and the project has not gone through the review process that White House renovations typically do. The process of tearing down the East Wing was expected to be completed as soon as this weekend, according to administration officials.

Politics

AOC, Sanders rake in millions as far-left cements grip on Democrat Party

Published

2 hours ago

October 23, 2025

Press Room

AOC, Sanders rake in millions as far-left cements grip on Democrat Party

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

The two most prominent progressives in Congress have outstripped the contributions of years past in 2025 as they ride the momentum of primetime attention progressives have received in recent months.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has raised $19.8 million from the start of the year through September, FEC filings reveal — dwarfing contributions from the 2023-2024 election cycle. She raised $15.2 million in those two years.

In similar fashion, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has collected $19 million in 2025. That’s more than half of what he raised between 2019-2024.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., greet the crowd together during a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour event at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., March 20, 2025. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)

The pair’s windfall has dovetailed with issues of national focus that have heightened progressives’ visibility. The government shutdown, the race for New York City mayor and persistent questions about the party’s direction have all given figures like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders a platform to make their case — even as the rest of the party has struggled to offer an alternative vision to Republican momentum.

SQUAD 2.0: MEET AMERICA’S NEXT WAVE OF RADICAL DEMOCRATS SHAPING THE PARTY’S FUTURE

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who also aligns with the leftward-leaning flank of the party, believes donors within the Democrat base are looking for something else and are willing to spend to show it.

“More than seven million people showed up on No Kings Day,” Warren said, referring to a series of protests against the administration that took place over the weekend in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. “They are deeply worried about the direction that Donald Trump is taking this country, and they want a way to fight back. Political contributions are part of the way to being in the fight.”

Warren suggested that support might be reciprocal to the Trump administration’s aggressive pursuit of its priorities in its first nine months in a way that wasn’t as prescient before the election.

“It’s beyond anything we’ve seen in modern history,” Warren said. “Folks might be excused for not having anticipated it.”

FROM AOC TO ZOHRAN MAMDANI, THE DEMOCRATS ARE PEDDLING FAR-LEFT POLITICS

Progressives could also be seeing more support in Congress because of what’s happening on the outside. Sanders pointed to Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, as one example of progressives finding the right faces to represent their movement and generate momentum.

“He’s got 80,000 volunteers knocking on doors. He’s generated a lot of excitement. He’s exactly the type of candidate we need all over this country,” Sanders said.

New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani speaks during an interview on “The Story with Martha MacCallum” on Fox News, Oct. 15, 2025. (Evan Agostini/AP)

Republicans have leaped at the opportunity to paint the visibility of progressives as emblematic of where the party is headed.

In one such case, GOP figures have made the case that the current government shutdown, now in its 23rd day, is a way for Senate Democratic leadership to keep the far-left base from cannibalizing more central figures in the party.

That’s a refrain House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has used repeatedly since the government went into a shutdown on Oct. 1 after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement over spending legislation.

“This shutdown is nothing more than political cover for Chuck Schumer and the Democrats. They are worried about the Marxist flank in the Democrat Party. The Marxists are about to elect a mayor in New York City. That’s Chuck Schumer’s state, and he’s terrified that he’s going to get a challenge from his far left,” Johnson said earlier this month.

SPECULATION SWIRLS AS AOC IS RUMORED TO HARBOR 2028 ASPIRATIONS: ‘SAVVY POLITICIAN’

Mike Johnson standing in a congressional doorway

As lawmakers debate a government funding extension, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., awaits the arrival of the leader of the Orthodox Christian Church, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew at the Capitol on Sept. 17, 2025. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

When asked if progressives are undergoing a watershed moment, Sanders said that they have simply adjusted to the country’s political landscape.

“The platform changes every day with the changing world,” Sanders said. “It’s a tough situation.”

Leo Briceno is a politics reporter for the congressional team at Fox News Digital. He was previously a reporter with World Magazine.

Politics

Commentary: Sanctuary policies and activists aren’t endangering lives during ICE raids — ICE is

Published

3 hours ago

October 23, 2025

Press Room

Commentary: Sanctuary policies and activists aren’t endangering lives during ICE raids — ICE is

Like with cigarettes, la migra should come with a warning label: Proximity to ICE could be hazardous for your health.

From Los Angeles to Chicago, Portlandand New York, the evidence is ample enough that wherever Trump sends in the immigration agency, people get hurt. And not just protesters and immigrants.

That includes 13 police officers tear-gassed in Chicago earlier this month. And, now, a U.S. marshal.

Which brings us to what happened in South L.A. on Tuesday.

Federal agents boxed in the Toyota Camry of local TikToker Carlitos Ricardo Parias — better known to his hundreds of thousands of followers as Richard LA. As Parias allegedly tried to rev his way out of the trap, an ICE agent opened fire. One bullet hit the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant — and another ricocheted into the hand of a deputy U.S. marshal.

Neither suffered life-threatening injuries, but it’s easy to imagine that things could have easily turned out worse. Such is the chaos that Trump has caused by unleashing shock troops into U.S. cities.

Rather than take responsibility and apologize for an incident that could’ve easily been lethal, Team Trump went into their default spin mode of blaming everyone but themselves.

Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the shooting was “the consequences of conduct and rhetoric by sanctuary politicians and activists who urge illegal aliens to resist arrest.”

Acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli chimed in on social media soon after: “I urge California public officials to moderate their rhetoric toward federal law enforcement. Encouraging resistance to federal agents can lead to deadly consequences.” Hours later, he called Times reporter James Queally “an absolute joke, not a journalist” because my colleague noted it’s standard practice by most American law enforcement agencies to not shoot at moving vehicles. One reason is that it increases the chance of so-called friendly fire.

Federal authorities accuse Parias of ramming his car into agents’ vehicles after they boxed him in. He is being charged with assault on a federal officer.

Time, and hopefully, evidence, will show what happened — and very important, what led to what happened.

The Trump administration keeps claiming that the public anger against its immigration actions is making the job more dangerous for la migra and their sister agencies. McLaughlin and her boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, keep saying there’s been a 1,000% increase in assaults on immigration agents this year like an incantation. Instead of offering concrete figures, they use the supposed stat as a shield against allegations ICE tactics are going too far and as a weapon to excuse the very brutality ICE claims it doesn’t practice.

Well, even if what they say is true, there’s only one side that’s making the job more dangerous for la migra and others during raids:

La migra.

It turns out that if you send in phalanxes of largely masked federal agents to bully and intimidate people in American cities, Americans tend not to take kindly to it.

Who knew?

Gregory Bovino, center, of U.S. Border Patrol, marches with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Aug. 14.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

We’re about to enter the sixth month of Trump’s plan to rid the country of undocumented immigrants. Sycophants are bragging that he’s doing the job, but they’re not caring to look at the mess left in its wake that’s becoming more and more perilous for everyone involved. They insist that those who are executing and planning raids are professionals, but professionals don’t make constant pendejos out of themselves.

Professionals don’t bring squadrons to chase after tamale ladies or day laborers, or stage flashy raids of apartments and parks that accomplish little else than footage for propaganda videos. They don’t go into neighborhoods with intimidation on their mind and ready to rough up anyone who gets in their way.

A ProPublica investigation showed that ICE has detained at least 170 U.S. citizens this year, many whom offered proof that they were in this country legally as la migra cuffed them and hauled them off to detention centers.

Professionals don’t lie like there’s a bonus attached to it — but that’s what Trump’s deportation Leviathan keeps doing. In September, McLaughlin put out a news release arguing that the shooting death of 38-year-old Silverio Villegas González in Chicago by an ICE agent was justified because he was dragged a “significant distance” and suffered serious injuries. Yet body cam footage of local police who showed up to the scene captured the two ICE agents involved in the incident describing their injuries as “nothing major.”

Closer to home, a federal jury in Los Angeles last month acquitted an activist of striking a Border Patrol agent after federal public defender Cuauhtémoc Ortega screened footage that contradicted the government’s case and poked holes in the testimony of Border Patrol staff and supervisors. Last week, ICE agents detained Oxnard activist Leonardo Martinez after a collision between their Jeep and his truck. McLaughlin initially blamed the incident on an “agitator group … engaged in recording and verbal harassment,” but footage first published by L.A. Taco showed that la migra trailed Martinez and then crashed into him twice — not the other way around.

Professionals don’t host social media accounts that regularly spew memes that paint the picture of an American homeland where white makes right and everyone else must be eliminated, like the Department of Homeland Security does. A recent post featured medieval knights wearing chain mail and helmets and wielding longswords as they encircle the slogan “The Enemies are at the Gates” above ICE’s job listing website.

The Trump administration has normalized racism and has turned cruelty into a virtue — then its mouthpieces gasp in mock horror when people resist its officially sanctioned jackbootery.

This evil buffoonery comes straight from a president who reacted to the millions of Americans who protested this weekend at No Kings rallies by posting on social media an AI-generated video of him wearing a crown and dropping feces on his critics from a jet fighter. And yet McLaughlin, Noem and other Trump bobbleheads have the gall to question why politicians decry la migra while regular people follow and film them during raids when not shouting obscenities and taunts at them?

As I’ve written before, there’s never a nice way to conduct an immigration raid but there’s always a better way. Or at least a way that’s not dripping with malevolence.

Meanwhile, ICE is currently on a hiring spree thanks to Trump’s Bloated Beastly Bill and and has cut its training program from six months to 48 days, according to The Atlantic. It’s a desperate and potentially reckless recruitment drive.

And if you think rapidly piling more people into a clown car is going to produce less clown-like behavior by ICE on the streets of American cities, boy do I have news for you.