Not one single living former U.S. president has gotten fully on board with President Donald Trump. It’s not really a huge surprise that such is the case, considering the fact that the president continuously peddles a racist mixture of nonsense. At times, he refuses to even put in the effort necessary to keep his facts straight. Instead, he often freely messes with the truth to try and make it fit his purposes.
One notable early instance of such unfolded early last year, when the president and his closest allies claimed the crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., for his inauguration to have been the biggest crowd gathered for a presidential inauguration ever. (It wasn’t.)
In light of the behavioral traits that incident makes clear on the president and his team’s part, Jimmy Carter is one of the former U.S. presidents to have refused to support Donald Trump. He’s a Democrat, and he’s also an ardent Christian, but even that has hardly proven to be enough to warrant him supporting the current commander-in-chief.
During a Saturday commencement address to graduates of Liberty University, Carter didn’t obsess with Trump, but he did make at least one jab at him.
He told those assembled:
‘This is a wonderful crowd. Jerry [Falwell Jr.] told me it’s even bigger, I hate to say this, than it was last year. I don’t know if President Trump would admit that or not.’
Watch video of Carter’s speech below.
His quip seemed to be a clear callback to the established penchant on the part of the president for obsessing over crowd sizes. The president’s obsession with the size of his inauguration crowd turned into one of the defining moments of the then-new administration. It was in that context that Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway floated the term “alternative facts” to explain the Trump team’s factually incorrect assertions.
In the time since, the president certainly has not established himself as a bearer of truth. In 2017, he gave the commencement address at Liberty University, as Carter indicated in his remarks; Trump was the second U.S. president to do so, the first being George H.W. Bush.
Although Carter didn’t explicitly focus on Trump in his remarks, some of what he did share could be considered a rebuke to his administration.
He told those assembled:
‘We decide whether we tell the truth or benefit from telling lies. We’re the ones who decide do I hate or am I filled with love. We’re the ones who decide do I only think about myself, or do I care for others. We ourselves make these decisions and no one else. There are no limits to our ambition.’
Carter has at times referenced Trump in public appearances of his in the past. During an appearance on The Late Show earlier this year, he told host Stephen Colbert that he does at times pray for Trump.
In the time since, Trump has hardly changed the way that he operates, instead continuing on with his aggressive campaign against marginalized people in the United States and elsewhere. He came into office having close to no apparent grasp of what he should be doing and he hasn’t proven interested in obtaining one since.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
