The headline you never thought you’d read said it all: “Jimmy Carter: I fear for our democracy.”
The 97-year-old former president has set the gold standard for post-presidencies, creating a pro-democracy foundation and traveling to dozens of countries over the years to monitor elections and try to ensure that they were free and fair – like America’s – and “unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power.”
Yet there he was in a New York Times op-ed, lamenting the state of his own country’s democracy, on the eve of the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection incited by one of his successors, a wannabe strongman who wouldn’t accept defeat.
Carter didn’t name Donald Trump, though it seems high time that he and the three other former presidents drop their tradition-bound silence about Trump’s conduct and take a united, bipartisan stand explicitly denouncing Trump for the threat he poses to American democracy.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, likewise, did not name Trump on Wednesday in a televised speech when he laid out the work of Justice Department over the last year in arresting and criminally charging 725 insurrectionists, tacitly responding to complaints that the department is focused too much on prosecuting the small-fry rioters rather than targeting the big-fish coup plotters, including the insurrectionist in chief.