The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy look at Donald Trump today that includes this tidbit about a certain Georgia Democrat.
The idea of a president as Everyman stands at odds with his glamorized vision for the nation. The president should be a man apart, exceptional and resplendent in every way. ''Jimmy Carter used to get off Air Force One carrying his luggage,'' Trump said. ''I used to say, 'I don't want a president carrying his luggage.' '' Carter was a nice man, Trump allowed. ''But we want someone who is going to go out and kick ass and win.'' Which apparently cannot be done by someone ''who's gonna come off carrying a large bag of underwear.''
There's a history of bad blood between the two. Trump wrote in his 1987 bestseller "The Art of the Deal" that Carter once came to the billionaire mogul with a big ask. Read on:
After he lost the election to Ronald Reagan, Carter came to see me in my office. He told me he was seeking contributions to the Jimmy Carter Library. I asked how much he had in mind. And he said, "Donald, I would be very appreciative if you contributed five million dollars."
But that experience also taught me something. Until then, I'd never understood how Jimmy Carter became president. The answer is that as poorly qualified as he was for the job, Jimmy Carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls, to ask for something extraordinary. That ability above all helped him get elected president. But then, of course, the American people caught on pretty quickly that Carter couldn't do the job, and he lost in a landslide when he ran for reelection.
The animosity goes both ways. In an interview with CNN, he panned the comments made by Trump about Mexican immigrants are "rapists" and "killers" and his plan to build an impassable wall on the Mexico-U.S. border.
"I think he's made some very stupid statements and I think ill-advised statements about immigrants. He'll get a tiny little part of the Republican Party support -- the ones that agree with him in an extreme way -- but he's a flash in the pan."
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