Amended transcript of “Then and Now,” my weekly conversation with Princeton Professor Julian Zelizer where we try to bring a little historical context to the news:
Julian:
This week, President Trump gave an 18-minute economic address. It made me think back to July 15, 1979, when President Jimmy Carter made his own address about a crisis of confidence. It’s called the “malaise speech,” though he never said the word “malaise.” In that speech, he takes blame for his own failures, and he asks Americans to look at themselves for some of the reasons that we faced these economic and existential problems. And famously, in the weeks that followed, especially after he calls for resignations of his Cabinet members, there’s fallout from the speech. So I was thinking about how these two compare, and considering your book about Carter, curious about your thoughts.
Jon:
Well, it’s just impossible to exaggerate the contrast. So of course Donald Trump is all about him— bragging and incessantly talking about how great he is. This week, he crammed a ton of lies about his accomplishments (exposed, as usual, by Daniel Dale of CNN) into a short speech of what Dale called “total fiction” where he yelled at the American people.
Jimmy Carter started the 1979 speech—one of the most fascinating ever delivered by an American president— with a description of all of the criticism of him he heard when he assembled a collection of Americans from different walks of life at Camp David beforehand. He spoke quietly but forcefully, as if he was not just a good preacher, but a decent person, which—especially in contrast to Trump—he was.
The way he confesses his shortcomings still amazes me. He quotes the potshots directly. He said, “One governor told me, ‘Mr. President, you’re not leading, you’re just managing.’” Another critic said, “Mr. President, why don’t you understand better what the American people want right now?” This went on for a while, one jab worse than the next. It was an astonishing level of candor. And then he went on—before he got to the energy policy part of the speech—to criticize American materialism and say that we had lost our way in the United States by caring too much about money.
Now, contrast that to Trump, who is all about the Benjamins, all the time. Things were plenty bad in the Seventies—worse, in some ways, than now. But at least we had a man of moral conscience at the top.
The speech ultimately failed. Thanks to Carter’s Svengali, consultant Pat Caddell, who came up with the idea for the speech, it eventually got tagged as running down the country even though “malaise” was never mentioned. Even “A Crisis of Confidence”—the official name of the speech— was too much for some people. Both Ronald Reagan, who won that, and Ted Kennedy, who was challenging Carter for the 1980 nomination, later said they thought the speech helped them.
But our assumption that the speech was a failure at the time is wrong. In fact, in the immediate aftermath, pretty much everybody liked the speech. Carter’s anemic poll numbers went up immediately—a sharp contrast to Trump this week.
I know this firsthand. I had been an intern in the speechwriting office of the Carter White House the summer before, in 1978, and on July 17, 1979—two days after the speech—I went to visit my friend Rick Hertzberg (later a New Yorker writer) inside the White House. Rick, who wrote most of the speech at Camp David, was very happy because it had gone well. The overnight ratings, polls and critical response were all positive. Decades later, when I was writing my Carter biography, I was surprised to learn that even Pat Buchanan liked the speech.
So what happened? The answer is that Carter—thinking that a shake-up might help him politically— made one of the worst decisions of his presidency: He asked for the resignation of all of his Cabinet members and he accepted five of them. This was just a bad idea. A lot of foreign governments with parliamentay systems thought that the American government had fallen. Carter looked inept, all of the goodwill that he got from the speech dissipated, and he went back down in the polls, though he later recovered somewhat.
But it was an astonishing speech. We had never seen anything like it before, and we will never see anything like it again— a president taking that much responsibility and that much blame.
And there’s hope in Jimmy Carter’s example. I think that after Trump we will see the emergence of a figure who, in some ways, resembles Carter after Watergate—somebody who represents the good in us. The next president or the one after that will be that person, very likely from the Democratic Party. Wes Moore? James Talarico? A candidate we haven’t heard of? Someone good will make the 2030s a time when America heals from the trauma we’re now experiencing. But even he or she will not do what Carter did and take all the blame for what ails us onto themselves.
