Former President Jimmy Carter is widely regarded as the worst American president of the modern age. Having been elected on the promise that he’d bring a new way of doing things to Washington, Carter’s presidency ended in disaster. The economy collapsed. There were legendary gas shortages. Carter questioned the logic of resisting the Soviet Union at all. He ceded the strategically vital oil-producing nation of Iran to rabid Islamists who still plague us today.
Everywhere one looked, America was failing under Jimmy Carter’s presidential leadership.
Despite these facts, though, Carter’s four, malaise-filled years in the White House look like glory days compared to what Americans are being subjected to under President Joe Biden.
Joe Biden Makes One Miss Carter
The differences between Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden are stark.
Carter was an up-from-his-bootstraps Georgia farm boy who made it big in the US Navy. Trained as a nuclear engineer, Carter found himself serving in the submarine service—specifically under the command of legendary Admiral Hyman Rickover—where he made a name for himself. He proved to be one of the few officers who could thrive under the withering demands of Admiral Rickover.
It was widely assumed that Carter would become an admiral.
That changed when Carter’s parents died and left their family peanut farm to their sailor son. Feeling compelled to help his family out, Carter abandoned his promising naval career (much to the chagrin of his wife) and moved back to rural Georgia, where turned the family peanut farm into a thriving business.
Carter was also a strong practitioner of his Baptist faith, teaching Sunday school and helping the dispossessed in his local community. Ultimately, Carter became interested in politics, was governor of Georgia, and then went on to run an unorthodox, successful populist-progressive campaign in 1976, which unseated President Gerald Ford.
Once in office, though, as you’ve read, his presidency was one disaster after another. To compound matters, the nuclear engineer was a control freak and treated his staff as though they were components of a nuclear reactor on a submarine. He rarely let them take the initiative and micromanaged them to the point of exhaustion.
Whatever other failings that transpired under Carter during his time in office, Carter’s background was respectable. He was the farthest thing from a career politician. This was one reason for why Carter failed to obtain a second term. His failures were infuriating and tragic. Biden’s failures were easily predictable and could have been avoided had he been booted from office at any point in his roughly 40-year career.
Biden is Corrupt
Joe Biden, on the other hand, is a career politician.
Almost from the start of his time in government, Biden was viewed as a buffoon—not just by the Republicans but by his own fellow Democrats. A back-slapper (and back-rubber), Biden wormed his way into positions of power by the sheer force of his personality.
Initially, with the tragic death of his first wife on the eve of his swearing in as a freshman United States senator, many colleagues felt sorry for him, and helped him along in getting committee assignments and support. When that faded, Biden dazzled his colleagues with his BS.
While serving in the Senate, it seems that Joe Biden may have gotten himself tied up in an illicit influence peddling scheme. This went on for so long that many suspect that Biden was involved with foreign actors, trading access to his office for lots of money.
Now that he’s president, a cloud of controversy hangs over President Joe Biden, notably in relation to China, which gave his son, Hunter, cartoonish amounts of money for reasons not totally known.
Since Biden took office, inflation in the United States has reached highs not experienced in decades (not since Jimmy Carter was in power). America’s enemies are pushing the world’s sold remaining superpower around like it’s some kind of ragdoll on the world stage.
Jimmy Carter essentially put the mad mullahs in power when he refused to defend the Shāh of Iran in 1979. Joe Biden intends to defacto give those same mullahs nuclear weapons and power over the Greater Middle East.
Speaking of giving Islamists greater power, Biden precipitously withdrew the United States from Afghanistan, sparking a long-running crisis of US power across the world. In fact, there is a direct line between the chaotic American pullout from Afghanistan and the illegal Russian decision to invade their neighbor in Ukraine.
The smell of death and decay wafts up from Joe Biden’s America in ways that are far more pungent than even when Jimmy Carter ran things.
Unlike Carter, Joe Biden Could Win Reelection
Across the board, America under Biden is in far more critical condition than it ever was under Jimmy Carter. The most galling aspect of the Joe Biden era is how likely he is to win reelection at this point.
Whereas America shook Carter off like a dog shakes off mud, Biden appears to be more akin to a political tick: it’ll take hardcore medical intervention to remove this partisan parasite from the body politic. Maybe impeachment over his potential involvement in Hunter Biden’s globe-trotting influence peddling schemes will save the republic. Maybe.
But the fact remains that, by year two of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, most Americans understood that the dude had to go. That is not the case for Joe Biden. And that’s what makes him more dangerous than Jimmy Carter ever was.
MORE: Could Donald Trump Be Disqualified from Becoming President Again?
MORE: Could Donald Trump Quit the GOP?
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (May 16), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
