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esteem that they pay to a member of one’s own family.” Indeed, Carter was harder on ex-president Barack Obama during the interview than on Trump. Both Carter and Trump had stern, demanding fathers. “Daddy expected me to be perfect,” Carter told me. “So I obeyed his orders and his wishes.”
Saying that he did not think “there’s much hope now that Israelis will ever permit a two-state solution,” he knocked Obama on the Middle East: “He made some very wonderful statements, in my opinion, when he first got in office, and then he reneged on that.”
Recalling that “we have 22 votes in our family and Obama got all 22 of them,” he complained that Obama had “refused” to talk to North Korea more, and then Carter lamented the fact that Obama joined in the bombing of Yemen.
I asked if he had Obama’s email address. “No,” he said flatly.
I wondered about his relationship with other presidents, given his body language in the famous picture where he stood off to the side, which he told Brian Williams was deliberate because “I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents.”
“I had my best relationship, when he was in office, with George HW Bush,” he said.
Carter is also not as bothered as some by Trump’s Vladimir Putin bromance. “At the Carter Center,” he said, “we deal with Putin and the Russians quite frequently concerning Syria.”
Did the Russians purloin the election from Hillary? “Rosie and I have a difference of opinion on that,” he said. She looked over archly. “They obviously did,” she said.
He said: “I don’t think there’s any evidence that what the Russians did changed enough votes, or any votes.”
Rosalynn pressed, “The drip-dripdrip about Hillary.”
Carter noted that in the primary, “We voted for Sanders.”
I asked the famously ethical Carter what he made of Obama’s post-presidential $400,000 speeches.
“I don’t care if he gets rich or Clinton gets rich or whatever,” he said. “I don’t want to get into a bragging position; I’m not trying to do that. But I announced when I was defeated I was not going to be on corporate boards, I was not going to try to enrich myself with speeches. I was patterning my policy after Harry Truman.”
When I compared the Clinton Foundation with the Carter Center, Carter noted: “Rosie and I put money in the Carter Center. We never take any out.”
I wondered how the starchy Carter, who put out a White House edict that nobody could fly first class, felt about the louche Trump White House, where conflict of interest has been replaced by confluence of interest.
“I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about,” Carter replied. “I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.”
On the issue of tearing down Confederate statues, the former president mused: “That’s a hard one for me. My great-grandfather was at Gettysburg on the Southern side and his two brothers were with him in the Sumter artillery. One of them was wounded but none of them were killed. I never have looked on the carvings on Stone Mountain or the statues as being racist in their intent. But I can understand African-americans’ aversion to them, and I sympathise with them. But I don’t have any objection to them being labelled with explanatory labels or that sort of thing.”
I asked if he thought the president was deepening racial divisions. “Yes, I think he is exacerbating it,” he said. “But maybe not deliberately.”
As a genuinely pious man, how does he feel about the Two Corinthians president bonding with evangelical voters, who do not desert Trump no matter how coarse his language or how upsetting the “Access Hollywood” tape was. Don’t the evangelicals seem cynical to stick? “Apparently not,” he replied.
In his book The Art of the Deal, Trump wrote that Carter came to his office to ask for $5 million for his presidential library.
Trump was impressed that Carter had “the nerve, the guts” to ask for something so “extraordinary,” but didn’t give it to him.
“He bragged about it,” Carter said wryly. “That was one of his major selling points, ‘I turned down Jimmy Carter.’” But now the indefatigable Carter is back with another nervy proposal.
Will Trump bite? ©2017 New York Times New Service