Biden confronts an ending with Carter’s funeral
By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN
(CNN) — Not a lot of men get to see what their own funerals are going to look like.
Even fewer get to speak at them.
For all the valedictory moments that Joe Biden and his staff lined up for his quiet final weeks in the White House – ceremonies awarding medals to supportive celebrities and political friends, receptions and fleeting moments of reflection with the dwindling number of top aides left around – Thursday is unique.
Biden will start the day at the National Cathedral, delivering a eulogy for the first presidential candidate he endorsed as a young senator. Standing there, he’ll see what fellow leaders do and say when they send off a president who left office under a cloud of disappointments and regrets.
And even in the closing days, came another: Biden’s planned trip to see Pope Francis, the likeminded leader of the Catholic faith that has defined Biden’s life from his childhood through the Masses he has continued to attend every Saturday evening of every week, was suddenly scrapped, days after his trip to Los Angeles to welcome his new great grandson was redefined by the massive wildfires that broke out while he was there.
“Is seeing all this coverage of Carter being a one-term president impacting his psyche about the last days of his presidency?” one former Biden aide told CNN. “The man set out to be president from the day he ran for office. Did he accomplish what he set out to accomplish? Is his legacy good enough for him?”
Biden has long thought about fate, endings, mortality. Now he is 82 years old, the strains of age bearing down on him more clearly than ever as he prepares to turn the presidency back to the man he had felt called into a battle for the soul of the country against.
He knows there are only so many years left ahead. Only so many years with his grandchildren and new great-grandchild, in a family that has both benefited and been buffeted from the 50 years he’s put them in the political spotlight. Only so many years left to round up donations and work on plans for his presidential library, wherever it ends up back home in Delaware. Only so many years until his is the funeral that lowers the flags to half-staff and brings the country to pause, at least for a moment.
For years, Biden has spoken about how his father died not long after he retired. If he stops working he’d die, he was known to say.
Trump dynamics circulate around Carter’s and future funerals
Biden has approved a plan for his own funeral, like every president is asked to. The details usually don’t slip out – though Biden revealed in March 2023, when Carter first went into hospice care, that the former president asked him to give a eulogy – but the broad strokes tend to remain the same: A procession that begins at the president’s home makes its way to the US Capitol to have the coffin placed on the same platform used since it held Abraham Lincoln’s, then a state funeral at the National Cathedral.
Biden has been to enough presidential and vice-presidential funerals over the years to know what tweaks and specifics he’ll want for his own.
Still, an uncomfortable thought has circulated among some Biden aides and longtime supporters in the days since Carter died: If Biden passes while Trump is president, would he get a state funeral? Trump has already railed against the flags set to still be at half-staff through his inauguration – would he lower them for the only person who ever beat him, or would he decline to like he initially did when Arizona Sen. John McCain died in 2018? They hope Biden lives a long time, but, several of those aides and supporters told CNN, they want him to live to see the end of Trump’s time as president and not have to worry about questions like these.
Biden is already seeing the immediate effect on this trip. While in Italy, he’ll also meet with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has disavowed the neo-fascist positions that her own political party formed with, but who just last week made her own pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump.
Trump, who again criticized Carter in his press conference on Tuesday, will also be in Washington for the funeral, after briefly paying his respects to the coffin during a visit to the Capitol on Wednesday evening. If he and Biden speak there, it will be their first in-person conversation since Biden welcomed him to the Oval Office post-election, and one of their few conversations ever overall.
A presidential funeral as boxes are packed in the West Wing
Carter’s funeral comes as the first big wave of off-boarding of White House staff began this week. Biden started taking hundreds of much delayed “departure photos” with aides in the Oval Office at the end of December, working through a yearslong backlog. Boxes are being packed.
While his public schedule has been sparser than ever, White House aides say that he is active and engaged, focused on trying to finish ceasefire negotiations in Gaza instead of the true peace deal he once dreamt of achieving, exerting small bits of executive power to protect federal lands, and deploying as much of the money from his infrastructure law and other key investment initiatives as possible. By their internal calculations, he will have announced 99% of the projects and obligated 90% of what he legally could, given the schedules of appropriation.
Biden is proud of that, but the achievement comes with bitter irony: He has complained about never getting the credit or the thanks from Americans for the many projects revolutionizing their communities that his agenda made possible, while Republicans in the House and Senate regularly celebrated the groundbreakings and ribbon cuttings despite voting against the bills that provided the funding, and many of those projects will now come online on Trump’s watch.
Aides told CNN that part of the motivation for rushing out announcements now is for accountability later, laying a foundation for them to claim the credit on Biden’s behalf as projects finish in the years to come. They said Biden wishes the money had moved more quickly and that he’s been checking in frequently on progress, like projects that fall under the Reconnecting Communities umbrella, reuniting communities that were torn apart by previous infrastructure, like he remembers I-95 did when it was built through Wilmington.
“It’s always the case that time sheds more light on accomplishments,” said Natalie Quillian, the White House deputy chief of staff leading the implementation effort.
In a reception for new members of Congress at the White House on Sunday, Biden told for perhaps his last time in public life the well-worn story of his first election to the Senate over 50 years ago, how he had been sitting in Teddy Kennedy’s office for orientation when the call came in to say that his wife and baby daughter had been killed in a car accident, and how the community of his colleagues embraced and sustained him. From that he segued into an admonition about January 6, 2021, which included a reference to the “former president” but only in the context of explaining his own decision to stick to a peaceful transfer of power and attending the inauguration, a courtesy he didn’t receive himself.
“This is all part of the tradition we have to begin to restore. And I hope you, too, will work to restore the traditions to keep this country stronger,” he said, even as Trump insists that Biden has overseen the worst transition ever, vows to target perceived political opponents and refuses to rule out using military force to take Greenland.
Biden is not delusional or unaware about what’s coming, but the wistfulness is easier to fall back on than grappling with his failure to defeat Trump and Trumpism. A man who has always talked about his deep belief in fate felt he had achieved his life’s ambition late – but during a defining moment for America – is now watching billionaires and world leaders genuflect as plans get made for mass deportations and punitive tariffs.
“The president has given hundreds of eulogies,” said Steve Ricchetti, one of the president’s longest serving and closest aides. “He attends remembrances and memorials. He is a very, very empathetic and generous person with respect to the contributions and the role of people who he has known along the way in his public life. And you’re seeing it underscored and emphasized in this final month.”
A shorter post-presidency may limit rethinking legacy
Carter was elected as a national reset after Watergate, but he ended up a one-term president who became a laugh line – “I don’t like to be compared unfavorably by anybody, of course,” the former president said in a 2018 interview, acknowledging the sting of becoming the go-to example of failure in the White House. Biden was elected as the hope for a return to normalcy after Trump and Covid, then became a personified symbol of Democrats’ creaky response to the changing world.
Actuarial realities, Biden knows just as well as anyone else, will make his post-presidency different than Carter, who was 56 when he left the White House and years ago broke the record for the longest living former commander-in-chief.
“Carter had the advantage of living in effect 10 times longer than his four years in office, which gave an opportunity for him to do things through the Carter Center to rebuild his reputation through his post-presidential work,” said Stuart Eizenstat, a former top Carter aide who later wrote a book evaluating his former boss’s presidency and who has long been friendly with Biden. “That also gave him an opportunity for people to start looking back at his presidency. … It will be harder for President Biden to do that because he has a shorter runway than President Carter did.”
Eizenstat said he last spoke with Biden about six weeks ago, before Carter died, but was struck by the closing of the presidency being a “very tough time for him.”
Ted Kaufman, Biden’s close friend and one-time Senate chief of staff, said it’s beyond him to predict exactly what history will say about the president or this period.
But he said Biden’s already in better shape than Carter was, pointing to the survey of presidential scholars from early last year ranking those who have held the office.
Carter was at #22. Trump was dead last. But for Biden, “after three years, presidential scholars put him at 14th overall,” Kaufman said. “These scholars, they know what they’re doing. I think down the road, they’ll hold him in high regard.”
In the meantime, Eizenstat argued he sees a silver lining to the funeral coming now.
“If Jimmy Carter had to die – and of course everybody does – it’s better that he died in the Biden administration, where he had a friend who was the first senator to endorse him. The whole atmosphere will be much different. I don’t think President Trump would have wanted to give a eulogy for Carter,” he said. “There is that fortuity.”
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