Dignified Rituals Before the ‘Hot Mess’ in Washington

Americans know what to do when a president dies.

We find the instructions they have often personally laid out. We polish the horse-drawn caisson, and we put on a show of pomp and circumstance that gathers political foes in a display of collective mourning, reflection and unity.

That’s what’s happening this week in Washington, where former President Jimmy Carter is lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda before a funeral tomorrow that will convene all five living current, former and future presidents: three Democrats and two Republicans. The pageantry is unfolding just days after the uneventful certification of the election, giving the nation an uncanny week of routine — of bipartisan political ritual — on the eve of political upheaval.

“It just made me happy,” the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told me today, “to see these moments can still exist.”

None of it is enough to cover up the nation’s stark political divisions. As Carter’s coffin approached the Capitol yesterday, it passed tall security fencing erected because the ritual of peacefully transferring power is no longer a given. President-elect Donald Trump stopped in at the Rotunda a few moments ago to pay his respects to Carter, but he earlier this week attacked one of Carter’s signature achievements, the permanent neutrality of the Panama Canal, and recently complained that Carter’s death means flags will be at half-staff when he is inaugurated in a week and a half.

And while nobody knows what awaits the country when the rituals of January are over, many insist they matter all the same.

“They are a demonstration to the citizens of this country and to the world that our country is not just the hot mess of what we see on social media every day,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat whose top role on the Senate Rules Committee means she is instrumental in coordinating inaugurations and memorial events at the Capitol, told me.

The rituals, she said, aren’t a comfort “as much as it is our duty to uphold the democracy, despite all of the daggers that are being thrown at it.”

A sense of continuity

The death of one president just before the inauguration of another has created an unusual confluence of events, one that has spurred Washington to celebrate its norms and to contemplate partisanship as it is now, and as it was nearly a half-century ago, as it prepares to inaugurate a president who has sworn to break with much of those customs.

On Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris certified her own electoral loss as Democrats looked on without challenging the results. On Tuesday, after Carter’s flag-draped coffin arrived at the Capitol, the top Republicans in Congress — House Speaker Mike Johnson and John Thune, the new Senate majority leader — heaped praise on a former president their party had long treated as a punchline for his sincere efforts to make the world a better place.

“He was here to get down in the weeds and the dirt, and he did that, literally,” said Thune, as he praised Carter’s hands-on work with Habitat for Humanity.

It was the kind of moment a historian like Goodwin, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln biography “Team of Rivals,” couldn’t get enough of — one that educated the public about Carter’s legacy and connected the nation’s past to its present.

“I think it gives you a sense of continuity with the past, which we need so much at a time when there is worry that norms will be undone,” Goodwin said in an interview from her home in Boston.

She hoped Carter’s funeral tomorrow, when even more political foes will convene, might be good for the country, riven as it is.

“If you don’t celebrate these moments,” she said, “then you’ve got nothing to hold on to.”

Goodwin added: “Maybe something happens, you know, when people come together like that.”

Still, signs of norm-busting to come are everywhere you look around the Capitol. As Carter lay in state on Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist Trump has nominated to run the Department of Health and Human Services despite his fringe views, was meeting with senators. And the president-elect has been musing about annexing places like Canada and Greenland — without ruling out doing so by force in some cases — while blaming California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, for the deadly wildfires in Los Angeles.

“In Palm Beach, we have a president who’s making imperialistic statements that arguably we haven’t heard in any form since the early 20th century,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia University. “So, yes, Washington may be seeking some kind of normal, but that doesn’t mean that’s the intention of the incoming president.”

A different feeling

I wanted to see the memorial for Carter myself. So this morning, I went to the Rotunda, where I met Betty Rogers, who never misses a dead president.

A 74-year-old resident of Washington, she said she had come to the Capitol to say goodbye to presidents like Ronald Reagan in 2004 and George H.W. Bush in 2018, and she returned again today to pay her respects to Carter, the man who catalyzed her family’s move from Louisiana to Washington when her former husband took a job in his administration.

She took in the awesome — in the original sense of the word — silence of the rotunda, where Carter’s flag-shrouded coffin lay underneath bright lights and the soaring dome. She thought about the way he integrated human rights into foreign policy. But she told me she felt that the feeling of tradition, of a remembrance that transcends party lines, had faded a little with Trump’s complaints about Carter and the half-staff flags.

“I feel like we’re missing an opportunity, not being able just to rest in the moment,” Rogers said. “Just being silent — that’s the best remembrance. Just a silent respect.”

A Carter legacy Democrats would like to forget

Since his death, Carter has been lauded for brokering the Camp David Accords and for his post-White House mission to help the poor and battle disease. But glossed over has been the burdensome legacy that Carter left for his party: a presidency long caricatured as a symbol of ineffectiveness and weakness. My colleague Adam Nagourney explains.

This perception was forged in the seizure of American hostages by Iranian militants in 1979 and the failed military attempt to free them, as well as the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. And it lingered in memories of Carter wearing a cardigan as he asked Americans to conserve energy, or bemoaning what he called a “crisis of confidence” in an address to the nation that became a textbook example of political self-harm.

Over the decades, these events have provided endless fodder for attacks by Republicans, who reveled in invoking Carter’s name to deride Democrats. And that mockery, in turn, influenced the way Democrats have presented themselves to voters.

Without Carter’s image of weakness on national security and defense, for example, it is hard to imagine the party’s war-hero candidate for president in 2004 introducing himself with a salute at its nominating convention and saying, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.”

Read more here.

— Adam Nagourney