Early in Mike Bartlett’s 2022 stage play, The 47th, the funeral of former US president Jimmy Carter is held at Washington National Cathedral. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W Bush and Bill Clinton are all in attendance. Donald Trump is not invited but turns up anyway – and late. “He’s here to pay his disrespects, and use / A funeral for self-promotion,” Kamala Harris observes.
Life – or rather death – is about to imitate art as Washington prepares to bid farewell to Carter, who died at home in Georgia on Sunday at the age of 100. He was the longest-lived president in US history and the first Democratic president to die since Lyndon Johnson more than half a century ago.
State funerals used to be nonpartisan occasions where Democrats and Republicans put their differences aside. But Carter’s passing comes at a hinge moment when division, rancour and uncertainty prevail. Biden, a fellow one-term president felled by inflation, is heading for the door. Trump, a chaos agent promising to wreak new havoc in the US and beyond, returns to power on 20 January.
“Moments like this tell us as much about ourselves as they do about the person being honoured and commemorated,” Jon Meacham, a presidential historian, told the MSNBC network. “And I think President Carter dying at this hour in the life of the republic is a reminder that we are at the end of something.”
Related: Jimmy Carter, longest-lived US president, dies aged 100
Carter became a friend and ally of the Republican he beat, Gerald Ford, while his presidential library was opened by his Republican successor, Ronald Reagan. Meacham added: “President Biden is trying very hard to be a pillar of that dignity and decorum but it would be dishonest of us to not note that it’s getting harder and harder for dignity and decorum to carry the day in the public square.”
Carter and Trump were born only 22 years apart but may as well have come from different centuries. Carter grew up on a farm in Georgia without electricity or running water; Trump had a comfortable upbringing in the affluent neighborhood of Jamaica Estates in Queens, New York.
Carter attended the US naval academy; Trump obtained a series of deferments during the Vietnam war. As president, Carter installed solar water-heating panels on the roof of the White House; Trump called the climate crisis a “hoax” invented by China.
Carter was married to one woman, Rosalynn, for 77 years (though he did once admit to Playboy magazine that he “committed adultery in my heart many times”). The thrice-married Trump allegedly committed adultery with an adult film actor and has been accused of sexual misconduct by two dozen women.
After his presidency, Carter and Rosalynn returned to live in their humble two-bedroom house in Plains, Georgia; after his, Trump plotted his revenge amid the gaudy trappings of Trump Tower in New York and Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
For years Carter worked with Habitat for Humanity helping build homes – sometimes with his own hands – for people in need across the world; Trump built his own property empire by fraudulently overvaluing his assets, a judge found last year.
Carter biographer Jonathan Alter told the Guardian in 2020: “I sent Carter an email saying: ‘Do you think you have anything in common with Donald Trump?’ and I got back a one word response: ‘No.’ Certainly in terms of their character, achievements, sense of responsibility, Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump have nothing in common.”
Related: ‘We lost a giant’: public figures pay tribute to Jimmy Carter
And Carter, a born-again Christian, spent decades teaching Sunday school at the Maranatha Baptist church in Plains. In a statement on Sunday, Barack and Michelle Obama suggested that many of the tourists who crammed the pews were there because of Carter’s “decency”.
The word was echoed by Biden at a press conference. But it is an increasingly unfashionable one in a time of indecent politics. Trump will soon be certified as the 47th president, four years to the day after he whipped up a furious mob to storm the US Capitol in a failed bid to cling to power.
He might also attend the state funeral for Carter, as he did for George H W Bush in 2018, awkwardly greeting former presidents he had publicly denigrated. During this year’s election campaign, Trump frequently observed: “Jimmy Carter is happy now, because he will go down as a brilliant president by comparison to Joe Biden.”
At the cathedral, Biden, who, like Carter, may hope that historians are kinder than voters to his legacy, will no doubt deliver a paean to the man he called a “dear friend” and “a man of a bygone era”. But with a heavy heart, he may also find himself giving a eulogy to a political epoch gone with the wind.
