That was fast: Donald Trump-Jimmy Carter détente crumbles

In mid-April, Trump called his predecessor to discuss China, according to Carter, which the Trump White House then confirmed. Carter, 94, told a Georgia Sunday school audience the discussion was prompted by a letter Carter wrote to Trump about relations between the United States and China.

“President Jimmy Carter wrote President Trump a beautiful letter about the current negotiations with China and on Saturday they had a very good telephone conversation about President Trump’s stance on trade with China and numerous other topics,” the White House said in an April 15 statement. “The President has always liked President Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter, and extended his best wishes to them on behalf of the American people.”

The call marked the first time the sitting commander in chief is known to have reached out to a predecessor on a policy issue. But the warm relations didn’t last.

On Friday, Carter said he doesn’t believe Trump, 73, won the 2016 election legitimately. Speaking at a Carter Center conference on human rights, the former president said a full investigation into Russian interference “would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016.”

“He lost the election and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf,” Carter said.

Trump soon fired back.

“He’s a nice man. He was a terrible president. He’s a Democrat, and it’s a typical talking point. He’s loyal to the Democrats, and I guess you should be,” Trump said from the G-20 Summit in Osaka, Japan. “As everybody now understands, I won not because of Russia, not because of anybody, but myself.”

So, add Carter to Trump’s enemies in the ex-president’s club.

Trump and Obama are not on speaking terms. At former President George H.W. Bush’s funeral, they exchanged a fleeting handshake while sitting next to each other but didn’t speak. And former first lady Michelle Obama wrote in her 2018 memoir Becoming that she could never forgive Trump for jeopardizing her family’s safety by promoting the birther conspiracy theory, which claimed Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, thus making him ineligible to be president.

Trump also regularly chides former first lady Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state and his defeated 2016 Democratic rival, and sometimes her husband, Bill Clinton. Former President George W. Bush has been a Trump target, too, from time to time, through criticism of the Iraq war he led as commander-in-chief. The Bush clan has largely kept its distance from Trump.

Carter, an ex-president now for more than 38 years, has also annoyed his Oval Office successors, both Democrats and Republicans. In fall 1990, he drew President George H.W. Bush’s anger over efforts to undermine the international coalition the U.S. and allies were building at the United Nations to eject Iraq from Kuwait, which it occupied that August.

Nearly four years later, Carter infuriated then-President Bill Clinton by inserting himself into diplomatic efforts to make Haiti’s military leaders step down and avert an imminent American-led invasion. And Carter went on to be a fierce critic of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy approach, particularly the Iraq War.

Carter’s 2002 Nobel Peace Prize was largely seen as a rebuke to Bush. Gunnar Berge, the Nobel committee chairman at the time, was blunt about his committee’s intentions. The award “should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken,” he said.