America – and Donald Trump – have much to learn from the life and service of Jimmy Carter

Editorial: The contrast between the peanut farmer and the mogul could not be more different as the US marks the passing of its most humble president – and braces for the return of its most divisive

As the tributes poured in from the United States and around the world, it was hard not to observe that even in death there can be good and bad timing – and Jimmy Carter’s was perfect.

He had reached the age of 100, to become the longest-lived US president ever. His state funeral will take place, appropriately, under a Democratic administration, and could well mark the last public appearance of Joe Biden as president before the inauguration of his successor.

Most of all, with just three weeks remaining before Donald Trump enters the White House for the second time, the passing of Jimmy Carter has provided the ideal pretext for Trump’s detractors to hurl yet more disapproving stones at the man they love to hate.

As presidents, and personalities, the two could not be further apart: Carter – modest, a man of faith, honest and honourable to a fault – and Trump – brash, self-confident, and a showman with a past punctuated by troubles with the law. It is a contrast that President Biden, a long-standing personal friend of Jimmy Carter, lost no time in exploiting.

The theme of his remarks about Carter was decency – with the strong inference that his elected successor was anything but. He advised Americans to try and be a little more like Carter, insisting that the former president’s qualities – “honesty, faith and humility” – were “for all times”, not part of a bygone era.

Whether the death of a president who left office almost half a century ago is the right occasion for such shameless political point-scoring can be debated. Mr Biden appears still to be smarting from his enforced withdrawal from the presidential race and the defeat of his vice-president, Kamala Harris.

But the overall tenor of the tributes to Carter still says much about how Americans like to view the institution of the presidency, even if it comes with a large dose of nostalgia. The ideal president has emerged from a modest background and made his own way up the political ladder on merit. He may have relatives of questionable character but he himself is honest and decent, in the tradition of George (“I cannot tell a lie”) Washington. As president, his intentions, not just towards his fellow Americans but towards the world at large, are benevolent, even if – as with Carter – things go awry.

Carter’s considerable diplomatic achievement in facilitating the Camp David Accords, which brought peace between Israel and Egypt, was soon eclipsed by the Iran hostage crisis and the failed rescue mission, which helped deprive him of a second term. Carter may be seen as a model US president with hindsight but he failed in his bid for re-election; and he mostly failed to improve the lot of the average American, opening the way for Ronald Reagan to win in 1980. And while Carter was the president the United States wanted and needed in the still-lingering wake of the Watergate scandal, the particular nature of his modest beginnings, as a peanut farmer and southerner, were electoral liabilities in some Washington circles.

Where Jimmy Carter certainly presents a model is less in his presidency than in his presidential afterlife. He had little choice but to retire quietly, given the scale of his failure – as seen at the time – of his four years in the White House. But his withdrawal into family life and his determined pursuit of good causes shows what a one-time US president can do with the considerable prestige of incumbency, so long as his good name is not impugned, as Carter’s never was.

He built not just the traditional presidential library but a successful charitable foundation. He addressed homelessness, poverty and disease – the causes that had taken him into politics in the first place – while judiciously keeping his distance from Washington and the political issues of the day. It is an example others could usefully follow, whether their presidency is deemed successful or not.

It must be doubted whether the contrasts now being drawn both with the state of the US today and with the character of the next president will serve to narrow any of the deep political divisions that afflict the country – although Donald Trump, for his part, was on best behaviour, describing Carter as a president who had come “at a pivotal time” for the country and had done “everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans”.

Whether this was intended by way of a pre-inauguration truce or just Mr Trump’s version of good manners hardly matters. Political hostilities will recommence after 20 January, if not sooner. In the meantime, it is surely worth pausing to wonder at a country and a political system where such polar opposites as Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump can not just aspire to but win the top job.