The week-long state funeral services honoring former President Jimmy Carter, who died at 100 last week, began Saturday morning. The ceremonies will honor Carter’s journey from his hometown of Plains, Georgia, to his esteemed role on the global humanitarian stage and as the 39th American president.

On Saturday morning, individuals gathered in downtown Plains to place flowers at the base of Carter’s monument. The tribute also featured Habitat for Humanity hardhats adorned with handwritten messages, including one that read, “God bless you, Mr. President,” USA Today first reported. 

Carter was the oldest living president, and President Biden has now taken that mantle at the age of 82 years, 2 months.

Carter’s specific cause of death on Dec. 29 was unclear. Carter’s death followed the passing of his wife Rosalynn on Nov. 19, 2023. She died at the age of 96 with her family by her side at the Carter home in Plains, just days after she had been admitted to hospice care. 

Carter’s motorcade arrived at the Carter Center in Atlanta just before 4 PM ET. As his casket was unloaded, a military band played “Hail to the Chief.”

During the private memorial service livestreamed on Fox News Channel, Carter was eulogized and stories from his life were shared.

His son, James Earl Carter III, spoke of a kind but firm parent who spent time with his Boy Scouts of America troop and took the family on vacations.

“Chip” Carter said that once, while working on the hiking merit badge, their troop hiked six miles to the family farm.

While roasting marshmallows and hot dogs on the fire, President Carter told ghost stories. Some of the tales appeared to spook the scouts to the point that they began employing the “buddy system” when they left the relative security of the fire to use the latrine and so on.

When Chip was in eighth grade, he recalled, he brought home an “F” on a Latin exam just before Christmas break.

“I didnt see any reason to learn latin no one spoke it very much,” he quipped. “But my father was not pleased.”

During their vacation, President Carter would take Chip’s Latin textbook, study it, and return to teach Chip what he had learned himself each day.

When Chip returned to school in January, he asked his teacher to retake the exam. When she assented, he returned home with a 100% score.

The Morehouse College Glee Club provided musical accompaniment during the service, including the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Late Saturday morning, Carter’s motorcade departed his hometown of Plains, a small farming community just below Fort Benning (now Fort Moore) and two hours above Tallahassee, Florida.

Carter’s funeral detail arrived in Atlanta on Saturday afternoon. He will lie in repose at the Carter Presidential Center campus. On its way there, the motorcade passed by the girlhood home of Rosalynn Carter. The couple had been married for 77 years when Mrs. Carter died.

JIMMY CARTER, 39TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, DEAD AT 100

The convoy also rolled by Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign headquarters and a gas station that had been owned by his brother, Billy Carter, according to the AP.

The motorcade also passed through the small community of Archery, Georgia – just outside Plains.

It was in Archery where Carter grew up on the family’s peanut farm owned by James Earl Carter Sr. The farm’s bell was rung 39 times on Saturday to honor the 39th president.

Carter’s mother, Lillian, was a nurse, who ironically delivered the then-Rosalynn Smith, who would go on to marry her son.

Carter’s body arrived in Atlanta around 3 p.m. ET, and stopped outside the Georgia State Capitol from where he once governed.

A moment of silence led by Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Atlanta Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens were also expected.

A service for Carter, which is not open to the public, will be held at his presidential campus around 4 p.m. ET.

U.S. President Jimmy Carter announces new sanctions against Iran in retaliation for taking U.S. Hostages, Washington, D.C., April 7, 1980.  (Marion S. Trikosko/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Here is the order of funeral events:

Saturday, Jan. 4:

•10:15 a.m.: The Carter family will arrive at Phoebe Sumter Medical Center in Americus, Georgia. Nine current and former Secret Service agents of Carter’s administration will serve as pallbearers, escorting his remains to the hearse.

•10:50 a.m.: The motorcade will travel through Plains, pausing briefly at Carter’s boyhood home in Archery. During this pause, the National Park Service will ring the historic farm bell 39 times, symbolizing Carter’s tenure as the 39th President.

•10:55 a.m.: The journey to Atlanta will begin.

FORMER PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER TO SPEND ‘REMAINING TIME’ AT HOME RECEIVING HOSPICE CARE

Former President Jimmy Carter steps off a plane upon landing at Havana’s international airport in Cuba, March 28, 2011.  (Adalberto Roque/AFP via Getty Images)

•3 p.m.: Upon arrival in Atlanta, the motorcade will stop at the Georgia State Capitol for a moment of silence led by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, and members of the Georgia General Assembly.

Georgia State Patrol troopers, both current and retired, will assemble on the Capitol steps, with those who served on Carter’s security detail during his governorship taking a place of distinction.

Tom Chaffin leaves flowers at the entrance to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Center on Tuesday, in Atlanta. Carter died Sunday at the age of 100.  (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

•3:45 p.m.: An arrival ceremony will take place at the Carter Presidential Center.

•4 p.m.: A private service will be conducted in the lobby of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.

•7 p.m.: President Carter will lie in repose at the Carter Presidential Center, allowing the public to pay their respects until 6 a.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 7.

A jar of peanuts is among the items left in tribute to former President Jimmy Carter at the entrance to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Center.  (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Subsequent services:

•Jan. 7: Carter’s remains will be transported to Washington, D.C., where he will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol for national homage.

•Jan. 9: A national funeral service will be held at the Washington National Cathedral, with President Biden expected to deliver the eulogy. Biden has declared Thursday as a National Day of Mourning. 

JIMMY CARTER EXPECTED TO LIE IN ROTUNDA AHEAD OF STATE FUNERAL SCHEDULED BY BIDEN

Former President Carter sits down for a TV interview to discuss his book, “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety.”  (Ida Mae Astute /American Broadcasting Companies via Getty Images)

Following the Washington service, Carter’s remains will return to Georgia for a private funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains. 

He will then be laid to rest next to his late wife, Rosalynn, at their residence.

Fox News Digital’s Andrea Magolis and the Associated Press contributed to this report. 

President-elect Donald Trump ushered in the new year in familiar fashion — using a news event in an attempt to build his case for tougher enforcement of the nation’s southern border, a change he said is crucial to stop violent criminals from flooding into the U.S.

After a pickup truck driver mowed down dozens of people in New Orleans, killing 14, in the first hours of New Year’s Day, Trump quickly issued a statement that implied the perpetrator had come into the country illegally.

He did not correct that assertion, and even escalated his rhetoric against the “open border” with Mexico, after it soon became clear that an initial news report that depicted the attacker as an immigrant was wrong.

The driver, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, has been identified as an American raised in Beaumont, Texas, who served in the U.S. Army and who authorities said acted alone when he drove into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street. The FBI said Jabbar was inspired by the Islamic State, a Sunni Muslim extremist group behind multiple terrorist acts over more than a decade.

Trump’s rhetoric and verbal salvos followed a familiar pattern, according to analysts who track his public pronouncements — combining hyperbole and false assertions to bolster his campaign against illegal immigration, a cause that he and his most ardent followers depict as crucial to America’s security.

“This is his way of previewing what he’s been running on since his first race in 2016 — that he’s going to take extreme measures to defend the border,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of communication and journalism at Texas A&M University. “He’s giving himself a permission structure based on these threats, which he is suggesting are not just imaginary but have now come to pass. And he’s using that as a way of saying, ‘Things are about to become very extreme.’ “

Trump described recent immigrants as criminals “far worse” than those already living in America. That stance amounts to “rhetorical ammunition, to provide the grounds by which he makes a case for doing what he wants to do anyway,” said Mercieca, author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.”

A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Two advisors to Trump’s presidential campaigns also did not respond.

Fox News initially reported Wednesday morning that the rental truck used in the New Orleans attack had crossed the border with Mexico just two days before the Bourbon Street carnage.

Minutes later, Trump issued his first statement on the attack. “When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” the statement read, in part. “The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

Donald J. Trump Jr. quickly posted on the social media platform X: “Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted: “Shut the border down!!!”

Not long afterward, Fox News joined other outlets in reporting that truck attack had been launched by an American citizen, Jabbar, not an immigrant. That correction did little to temper Trump’s fervent rhetoric.

“Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” the incoming president wrote on X on Wednesday night. “This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership.”

In what may have been one concession to the new information about Jabbar’s status as an American, not an immigrant, Trump went on to fault law enforcement for not not protecting Americans from “outside and inside violent SCUM.”

Statements by Trump and his followers in the aftermath of the attack focused on Jabbar’s “otherness” and added disdain for the media and others who noted that Jabbar was an American citizen, said Robert Rowland, a communications professor at the University of Kansas.

“In Trump’s mind, although that person is an American citizen, he seems to reject Christianity and to reject the military, and in turning away from those things that makes him un-American,” Rowland said.

Many of Trump’s core followers are working-class people who have expressed a pronounced unease with demographic shifts in the country, with newcomers perceived to be unlike those who arrived before them, said Rowland, author of “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy.”

“There is an extreme discomfort with the pace of social and cultural change,” Rowland said. “And the core group that has that sense is, broadly speaking, the working class and, specifically, the white working class.”

One X user sounded agitated when mainstream news outlets reported that Jabbar was an American citizen, suggesting the media recoiled from naming the true threats to the country. “Phew,” wrote the X critic, “because we all would hate to think a non-citizen, or an illegal immigrant, could ever harm innocent people.”

Trump and his team have not hesitated in the past to stoke fear about immigrants.

In his September debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump repeated a claim — thoroughly debunked by multiple individuals and government officials — that Haitian migrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.

The Republican presidential candidate never backtracked on that claim. And his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, soon suggested that “first-hand accounts of my constituents” gave him reason enough to repeat the assertion.

Although the pet-eating stories had not been verified, Vance said they brought attention to the issue of U.S. communities being overwhelmed with migrants. (The Haitians around Springfield went there legally, authorities said.)

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” Vance said in an interview with CNN. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Statements about dangerous immigrants are all part of a “very crass political calculation” designed to turn them into “hate objects so they can then be attacked and ostracized,” Mercieca said. She acknowledged that “other people might have a more charitable read” on the Republicans’ intentions.

Republicans did not hesitate to amplify Trump’s words and to say they justified an immigration crackdown. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) went on Fox News on New Year’s Day to protest the “wide-open border,” and “the idea that dangerous people were coming here in droves and setting up potential terrorist cells around the country.”

Johnson, reelected speaker Friday, suggested that the House might try to again raise a bill similar to the one it approved in 2023. That legislation — killed by the Democratic-controlled Senate — would have extended the wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, reimposed a policy of keeping migrant asylum-seekers either in Mexico or in detention facilities in that country and sped up deportation of unaccompanied children.

A day after the attack, Trump refocused his social media attack on “Radical Islamic Terrorism,” saying that it and “other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”

He suggested during his campaign that he would resurrect a controversial travel ban on five Muslim-majority nations. The plan was modified after facing legal challenges. But Trump defended it on national security grounds and said he would now use it to ban refugees from the war in Gaza.

“Many of us were hoping he would act as president, rather than continue to exploit a tragedy to divide Americans and advance his anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant agenda,” said Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ office of Greater Los Angeles.

“He is fueling bigotry, fueling anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant sentiment,” said Ayloush, “which we have seen again and again, lead to violent attacks on people presumed as Muslim and immigrant.”

Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior advisor, promoted the idea that the act was connected to migration.

“Islamist terrorism is an import. It is not ‘homegrown.’ ” Miller posted on X after the attack. “It did not exist here before migration brought it here.”