Politics
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.
Politics
Trump renews bridge, power plant threat against Iran in push for deal, mocks ‘tough guy’ IRGC
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President Donald Trump mocked the Islamic Revolutionary Guard on Sunday morning for staking claim to a Strait of Hormuz “blockade” the U.S. military had already put in place.
“Iran recently announced that they were closing the Strait, which is strange, because our BLOCKADE has already closed it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They’re helping us without knowing, and they are the ones that lose with the closed passage, $500 Million Dollars a day! The United States loses nothing.
“In fact, many Ships are headed, right now, to the U.S., Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska, to load up, compliments of the IRGC, always wanting to be ‘the tough guy!’”
Trump declared Saturday’s IRGC fire was “a total violation” of the ceasefire.
“Iran decided to fire bullets yesterday in the Strait of Hormuz — A Total Violation of our Ceasefire Agreement!” his post began.
“Many of them were aimed at a French Ship, and a Freighter from the United Kingdom. That wasn’t nice, was it? My Representatives are going to Islamabad, Pakistan — They will be there tomorrow evening, for Negotiations.”
Trump remains hopeful about diplomacy, but is not ruling out a return to force, where he once warned about ending “civilation” in Iran as they know it.
“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran,” Trump’s stern warning continued.
“NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!
“They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they don’t take the DEAL, it will be my Honor to do what has to be done, which should have been done to Iran, by other Presidents, for the last 47 years. IT’S TIME FOR THE IRAN KILLING MACHINE TO END!”
Judge Troy Nunley was fed up.
Federal immigration officials had once again flouted his authority by keeping a man locked up in a California City detention center after Nunley ordered him released. When he was finally set free, the man was booted onto the street with no passport, driver’s license or other personal effects. The judge’s demand that the items be returned were met with silence.
And so on Tuesday, Nunley, the chief judge of the Eastern District of California, slapped Department of Justice attorney Jonathan Yu with an official sanction and a $250 fine.
In a scathing order, Nunley laid out why he was compelled to take such a rare step. The fine may have been less than some traffic tickets, but it’s nearly unheard for a judge to formally admonish a government lawyer.
By Yu’s own admission, he was drowning in work. In his order, Nunley recounted the attorney’s claim he’d been assigned more than 300 nearly identical cases in the last three months, all of immigrants in detention who argued they were being held without cause.
Court filings show many California cases involve longtime U.S. residents unexpectedly hauled off to jail after routine check-ins with immigration officials. One was an Afghan who’d helped the American war effort. Another a Cambodian grandmother of eight who fled Pol Pot’s killing fields as a girl nearly 50 years ago.
Until last year, most would have fought deportation on bond after a brief hearing with an immigration judge. Now, their only hope of release is to file a petition for writ of habeas corpus — a legal maneuver once typically reserved for death row inmates and suspected terrorists — inundating the country’s busiest federal courts with thousands of emergency suits.
The Trump administration attorney said he was trying to “triage” the situation, but Nunley found he repeatedly failed to comply, leaving people with the right to walk free stuck behind bars.
“The Court is not persuaded,” he wrote, issuing the sanctions.
The order came days after Nunley took the unusual step of announcing a “judicial emergency” in the district, which covers nearly half of California, stretching from the Oregon border to the Mojave Desert in the inland part of the state, including Fresno, Bakersfield and Sacramento.
In the last year, the Eastern District has received more petitions from immigration detainees than almost any other jurisdiction in the United States: More than 2,700 since January, compared to fewer than 500 last year and just 18 in 2024. Similar crises are playing out elsewhere, with federal courts in Minnesota briefly paralyzed amid the Trump administration’s enforcement blitz there last winter.
People detained are seen behind fences at an ICE detention facility in Adelanto, California on July 10, 2025.
(Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)
In an interview with The Times, Nunley said dealing with the surge of activity since last summer has been “like being hit over the head with a bat.”
“We’re up all night doing these cases,” he said.
So far this year, the Eastern District’s six active judges have ordered almost people 2,000 freed.
“The majority of the cases that we see are cases where people should not be detained,” Nunley said. “They should be receiving hearings to determine whether or not they are to remain in this country, and until they receive those hearings, they should be free.”
Since last July, the Department of Homeland Security has ordered that all immigrants it arrests are subject to “mandatory detention” — a policy that had previously only applied to those caught at the border.
The change came four days after President Trump signed a spending bill that earmarked $45 billion to expand the federal network of immigrant lockups.
“This has been a sea change in the way the government has read the law,” said My Khanh Ngo, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “Almost every judge who has looked at this has agreed these people should get bond, and yet thousands of people are still sitting in detention.”
Elizabeth Vega, 15, right, and Darlene Rumualdo, 15, from Torres High School join labor organizers, clergy leaders and immigrant rights groups to protest immigration raids nationwide at La Placita Olvera in downtown Los Angeles on January 23, 2026.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Longtime U.S. residents who might once have fought removal from home — where they can more easily gather evidence to support their case and confer with lawyers — are instead being held indefinitely.
Many have no criminal record. Some have been in the U.S. so long that the countries they came from no longer exist.
“People are locked up in the same facilities as people accused of crimes, people who’ve been convicted of crimes … and then you’re telling people, you have no shot of getting out,” Ngo said. “Detaining people and not giving them the chance to get out of detention is a way of coercing people to give up their claims.”
The habeas process can take weeks or months depending on the judge and the district.
“When the immigration cases dropped on our district, we got hit harder than any other outside West Texas,” Nunley said. “Initially we had more cases than anyone else.”
Today, data compiled by ProPublica and legal activist groups including the Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative show almost a quarter of the roughly 30,000 active habeas petitions in the United States are in California courts. Nunley’s own tabulations show half the California cases are in his district, where a perfect storm of stepped-up enforcement, a large population of immigrant workers and a concentration of detention centers produced a flash flood of habeas petitions.
The cases rely on the Constitution’s guarantee of due process before being deprived of life, liberty or property. But according to court filings, in some instances the government has argued “the Fifth Amendment does not apply” to detained immigrants.
DOJ lawyers responding to the bids for freedom now regularly complain they’re being crushed under paperwork.
Judges accustomed to having government lawyers comply with their orders have been left fuming.
In California’s Central District, which includes L.A. and surrounding areas, Judge Sunshine Sykes wrote a fiery decision earlier this year that said the Trump administration is inflicting “terror against noncitizens.”
Sykes is one of several federal judges across the country that have tried to compel the government to resume bond hearings. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked that decision in March, leaving the habeas system in place for now. But with challenges or recent decisions across multiple circuits, experts say the fight is fated for the Supreme Court.
“ICE has the law and the facts on its side, and it adheres to all court decisions until it ultimately gets them shot down by the highest court in the land,” a Homeland Security spokesperson said in an email to The Times.
A woman holds a “ICE not welcome here!” sign at a vigil in San Pedro in January.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
The lawyers fighting to free those jailed under the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy say they were not initially equipped for these legal battles because they used to be exceedingly rare.
Most federal judges had only seen a handful of habeas petitions before last summer — then suddenly they had hundreds of requests for urgent relief, according to Jean Reisz, co-director of the USC Immigration Clinic.
Reisz said there are efforts to get pro bono law groups trained on how to effectively argue habeas cases, “but it takes a while to get up to speed.”
A federal agent asks residents to move back after a shooting during an immigration enforcement operation in Willowbrook on January 21, 2026.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
At the same time, Reisz said, lawyers are pushing judges who oversee the cases to act swiftly, since interminable procedural delays ensure people remain incarcerated.
“Most of the habeas petitions include a motion for temporary restraining orders, and that requires emergency decisions from the courts, which requires the courts to act very fast,” Reisz said.
In California’s federal district courts, the backlog remains thousands deep. Nunley said the system is struggling to keep up with the crush of cases.
“There’s nothing that says that noncitizens should not be entitled to due process,” Nunley said. “These are our people, they reside in our district. They’re entitled to the same due process that you and I are entitled to.”
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Saturday that the Trump administration is sanctioning a senior Nicaraguan official over alleged human rights violations.
Rubio said the U.S. is designating Vice Minister of the Interior Luis Roberto Cañas Novoa for his role in “gross violations of human rights” under the government of President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo, marking what he said was the latest effort to hold the regime accountable.
“The Trump administration continues to hold the Murillo-Ortega dictatorship accountable for brutal human rights violations against Nicaraguans,” Rubio said in a post on X. “I’m designating Nicaraguan Vice Minister of the Interior Luis Roberto Cañas Novoa for his role in human rights violations.”
RUBIO TESTIFIES IN TRIAL OF EX-FLORIDA CONGRESSMAN ALLEGEDLY HIRED BY MADURO GOVERNMENT TO LOBBY FOR VENEZUELA
Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks at the State Department, April 14, 2026. The U.S. announced sanctions on a Nicaraguan official tied to alleged human rights abuses under the Ortega-Murillo government. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
The designation was made under Section 7031(c), which allows the State Department to bar foreign officials and their immediate family members from entering the United States due to involvement in significant corruption or human rights abuses.
The State Department has said the Ortega-Murillo government has engaged in arbitrary arrests, torture and extrajudicial killings following mass protests that began in April 2018.
“Nearly eight years ago, the Rosario Murillo and Daniel Ortega dictatorship unleashed a brutal wave of repression against Nicaraguans who courageously stood against the regime’s increased tyranny, corruption, and abuse,” the statement reads.
The State Department said that the sanction marked the anniversary of the 2018 protests, after which more than 325 protesters were murdered in the aftermath.
A panel of U.N.-backed human rights experts previously accused Nicaragua’s government of systematic abuses “tantamount to crimes against humanity,” following an investigation into the country’s crackdown on political dissent, according to The Associated Press.
The experts said the repression intensified after mass protests in 2018 and has since expanded across large parts of society, targeting perceived opponents of the government.
TRUMP ADMIN ANNOUNCES EXPANSION OF VISA RESTRICTION POLICY IN WESTERN HEMISPHERE
Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega delivers a speech during a ceremony to mark the 199th Independence Day anniversary, in Managua, Nicaragua Sept. 15, 2020. (Nicaragua’s Presidency/Cesar Perez/Handout via Reuters)
Nicaragua’s government has rejected those findings.
The designation follows a series of recent U.S. actions targeting the Ortega-Murillo government. In February, the State Department sanctioned five senior Nicaraguan officials tied to repression, citing arbitrary detention, torture, killings and the targeting of clergy, media and civil society.
Earlier this week, the department also announced sanctions on individuals and companies linked to Nicaragua’s gold sector, including two of Ortega and Murillo’s sons, accusing the regime of using the industry to generate foreign currency, launder assets and consolidate power within the ruling family.
The State Department said the move is part of ongoing efforts to hold the Nicaraguan government accountable for its actions.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Nicaraguan government and its embassy in Washington for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
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A man waves a Nicaraguan flag during a demonstration to commemorate Nicaragua’s national Day of Peace, which is celebrated in the country on April 19, and to protest against the government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega in San Jose, Costa Rica on April 16, 2023. (Jose Cordero/AFP)
The Trump administration has taken an increasingly aggressive posture in the Western Hemisphere in recent months, including a Jan. 3, 2026, operation that resulted in the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
The U.S. has also carried out a series of strikes targeting suspected drug-trafficking vessels in the region, part of a broader crackdown tied to regional security and narcotics enforcement efforts.
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