Trump’s Carter problem
by Joseph Curl · The Washington TimesOPINION:
President Trump has spent the better part of a decade using Jimmy Carter as a punchline. “Worst president in history,” he has called him, usually right before pivoting to how great his own numbers are.
Funny thing about karma: It doesn’t care how many times you’ve said “worst president” into a microphone. It just waits.
Six months into his war with Iran, Mr. Trump is polling at roughly 30% approval and 60% disapproval — a gap that even Carter, hostage crisis and all, never quite matched.
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Carter left office bruised but was still remembered, per a CBS News polling analysis, as “intelligent and caring,” even as voters soured on his leadership.
Mr. Trump doesn’t appear to be getting the same treatment. The personal-favorability cushion that used to protect him is thinning out too, with RealClearPolling’s averages showing a -17.2 net approval rating and a -14.6 net favorability. This small but real gap suggests that even people who do not hate Mr. Trump the man are souring on Mr. Trump the president.
That is Carter’s exact affliction, just wearing a different tie.
And Mr. Trump knows it. Three people close to the president told MS NOW that his private tone on Carter has shifted. “Trump relates to Carter right now more than he ever has before,” one said. “It’s not to say he’s more of a fan of Carter, but the past six months have been evidence that dealing with Iran feels like an impossible task. He certainly feels some of Carter’s pain there.”
Another person close to Mr. Trump said Carter’s legacy is “one that Trump has long criticized and is dead set on avoiding” — which is a polite way of saying the ghost is loose in the building and nobody can get it to leave.
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The parallels aren’t subtle once you look. Carter had 52 Americans held hostage in Tehran for 444 days and a failed rescue mission, Operation Eagle Claw, that killed eight servicemen before it even reached the embassy. Mr. Trump has Iran holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage instead, choking off oil traffic and sending gas and diesel prices soaring for months with no resolution.
“If you look at what happened with Jimmy Carter, also with Iran, but if you look at what happened with the helicopters and the hostages, it cost them the election,” Mr. Trump himself said.
Later, asked why he hadn’t sent Special Forces into Iran, Mr. Trump put it more bluntly: “I didn’t feel like being Jimmy Carter.”
He said it. Out loud. Which means somewhere in his head, the comparison was already running before anyone else made it for him.
Then there’s Vice President J.D. Vance, supposedly the administration’s smooth talker, going on Fox News to tell Americans not to “gripe about the little things”: gas prices near COVID-19-era highs, U.S. casualties in the Iran war, the cost of groceries.
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“This is not the time to sort of gripe about all the little things,” Mr. Vance said.
If that sentence gives you flashbacks, it should. It’s the 2025 remix of Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech, minus the cardigan. Telling a struggling public to stop complaining has never once worked as a campaign strategy, and it’s not going to start now just because the messenger has pretty eyelashes.
Here is the part that should really sting: The inflation squeezing Americans right now isn’t even Iran’s fault. It’s Mr. Trump’s. The New York Fed found that prices on 67 categories of everyday goods were 2.9 percentage points higher since February because of Mr. Trump’s own tariffs. Without them, those prices would have actually fallen nearly 1%, the bank said.
Researchers Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise and David Weinstein wrote that “tariffs have a larger and more drawn-out impact on consumer prices than the direct effect alone would suggest.”
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Mr. Trump insisted companies would just eat the cost. The New York Fed found that about 26% of it got passed straight to shoppers instead.
And Americans, it turns out, noticed.
Carter’s 1970s stagflation grew out of a genuine oil shock, OPEC’s embargo and a Federal Reserve that panicked its way from rate cuts to rate hikes and back until it broke the economy’s confidence entirely.
Today’s version has a different origin story — tariffs instead of an embargo and a war that the administration started rather than one that was declared against it — but the symptoms rhyme uncomfortably well. We have rising prices, stalled wages, a public losing patience and a president increasingly isolated from his own numbers.
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Carter eventually rebuilt his reputation through diplomacy, Habitat for Humanity and a Nobel Prize that Mr. Trump has openly coveted and never won. Mr. Trump will be 82 when his second term ends, leaving him a much shorter runway for a redemption arc.
President Trump spent years making sure nobody confused him with Jimmy Carter. The numbers suggest he should have worried less about the comparison and more about the war.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com.
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