Jimmy Carter’s death comes at a time when rancour and uncertainty prevail
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The ex-president died as Biden, a fellow one-term president heads for the door and chaos agent Trump returns to power. 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.”.
