Jimmy Carter Told Trump How To Put America First, But Will He Do It?
With President Jimmy Carter’s passing and Donald Trump about to return to the White House, it’s a good time to recall a phone conversation that Carter had with Trump during his first term. Carter’s advice would serve Trump well if he really wants to fulfill his campaign promise to Put America First–something he failed to do in his first term.
In April 2019, Jimmy Carter told his church congregation in Georgia that President Trump had called him for advice about China. Carter said he told Trump that China was economically overtaking the United States as the world’s largest and most dynamic economy because the United States had spent decades wasting trillions of dollars to fight endless wars, while China had instead focused on economic development and lifted hundreds of millions of its people out of extreme poverty. “China has not wasted a single penny on war,” Carter said, “and that’s why they’re ahead of us, in almost every way.”
The next day, the White House confirmed that the two presidents “had a very good telephone conversation about President Trump’s stance on trade with China and numerous other topics.”
Some of Trump’s statements during the election campaign suggest that he hasn’t forgotten Carter’s advice. At the very least, he got the message that peace would be good for America, and that a lot of Americans understand that. Majorities of Americans have long supported a ceasefire in Gaza, and a plurality now support a negotiated peace in Ukraine, too. Trump promised to deliver on both. He even said that he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, based on his good relations with leaders in Russia and Ukraine.
Americans may be more worried about problems closer to home than the Middle East or Ukraine, but President Carter connected the dots between U.S. war-making and our quality of life in America.
“And I think the difference is, if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure, you’d probably have $2 trillion leftover,” Carter explained to his congregation. “We’d have high-speed railroad. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing, we’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong.”
What Carter described to Trump is the classic choice between “guns and butter” that faces every society. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the United States was a rising economic power, like China today. Europe’s imperial powers destroyed each other in the First World War, leaving even the victors, Britain and France, with multibillion dollar debts to J.P. Morgan and the U.S. Treasury. The United States’ economic success made it the world’s banker and industrial leader and gave it a decisive role in the history of the 20th century.
Today, it is the United States that has an unprecedented national debt of $36 trillion, and our military budget consumes 56% of federal discretionary spending, putting the squeeze on all our other needs. But we can still enjoy shared prosperity and a brighter future if Trump can do as Carter advised him and wean our government off its addiction to war.
So why are we not reassured by Trump’s promises to make peace and put America first? There are three things that worry us: his first-term track record; his second-term cabinet picks; and his aggressive rhetoric since the election (as opposed to what he said on the campaign trail).
Let’s start with his track record. Despite loud promises to tackle the entrenched interests of the “Deep State” and to “Drain the Swamp,” Trump’s first term was four years of Christmas Days for billionaires and corporate interests, starting with the military-industrial complex. In FY2025 inflation-adjusted dollars, Trump spent an average of $292 billion per year on Pentagon “investment” accounts, or payments to weapons makers and other military suppliers. That was a 24% increase over Obama’s second term.
Trump’s record tax giveaway to his billionaire buddies was not balanced by any cuts in military spending, which was as much of a sacred cow to him as to Bush, Obama and Biden. This toxic combination blew up the national debt, leaving nothing in the kitty for improving education, healthcare, public transportation or any of our society’s other critical needs. That tax cut will expire in a year’s time, but Trump has made it clear that he intends to give even greater tax breaks to his billionaire buddies.
Trump deserves credit for not starting any new wars during his first term, but his escalations of Bush’s and Obama’s wars made his first year in office in 2017 the heaviest year of U.S. and allied bombing since the First Gulf War in 1991, dropping more than 60,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia.
Many Americans remember Trump’s shocking statement that “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” What the U.S. corporate media swept under the rug was that the Iraqi forces who captured the bombed out ruins of Islamic State’s stronghold in Mosul’s Old City took Trump at his word and killed all the survivors, including women and children, just as Israel is doing in parts of Gaza today. Maybe now Trump can understand that normalizing war crimes only leads to more war crimes, not to peace or stability.
When it comes to Trump’s new cabinet picks, he might have jettisoned some of the worst hawks in his last coterie, such as John Bolton, but some of his nominees for top foreign policy jobs are awful, including Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor nominee Mike Waltz and Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth.
Tulsi Gabbard is a more encouraging choice as National Intelligence Director, but as a House member, she voted for two thirds of Obama’s and Trump’s military spending bills, and was always a pushover for expensive new weapon systems. As we asked when she ran for president in 2020, which Tulsi Gabbard will we see in her new job? The one who opposes regime change wars and the new Cold War with Russia, or the one who couldn’t say no to nuclear-armed cruise missiles in 2014, 2015 or 2016? And who will Trump listen to? Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance, who is more non-interventionist, or warmongers Rubio and Waltz?
We don’t want to place too much stock in Trump’s often contradictory public statements, but he has sounded very hawkish lately. If you believe everything Trump says, he wants to buy Greenland, invade Mexico to fight immigrants and drug gangs, annex Canada as the 51st state, put 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and seize the Panama Canal and close it to China. In Trump’s last term he badgered NATO countries to increase their military spending to 2 percent of GDP, but now he is calling on them to spend a staggering 5 percent, far more than the 3.1 percent of GDP that the U.S. spent in 2024.
This is a test for the American people. Do we want a showman, tough guy president, playing ringmaster of the corporate media circus? Do we want a leader who threatens to invade Canada, Mexico, Panama (again) and Greenland, like an American Netanyahu dreaming of a Western Greater Israel? Or should we demand a president who really puts America First? A president who makes peace in Ukraine and the Middle East? A president who finally starts bringing our troops home from those 800 foreign military bases all over the world? A president who can look at a map and see that Guantanamo is in Cuba and the Golan Heights are in Syria?
As Jimmy Carter told Trump, by making peace and renouncing war and militarism he can actually put America First, save trillions of dollars and invest in America. The Democrats have had their chances to do right by the American people and they’ve blown it so many times we’ve lost count. So the ball’s in Trump’s court. Will he follow Carter’s sage advice?
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, with an updated edition due in March 2025.
Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
Trump Should Pattern Presidency After Eisenhower
“God help the Nation when it has a President who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do.” – President Dwight D. Eisenhower speaking to his trusted White House Staff Secretary, Gen. Andrew Goodpaster.
These words are quoted in the book “Ike’s Bluff – President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle To Save The World” by Evan Thomas.
In the same paragraph as the words above are these: “When Defense Secretary Neil McElroy warned him that further cuts would harm national security, Eisenhower acerbically replied, ‘If you go to any military installation in the world where the American flag is flying and tell the commander that Ike says he will give him an extra star for his shoulder if he cuts his budget, there’ll be such a rush to cut costs that you’ll have to get out of the way.’”
President Trump did a good job leading this nation into four years of peace and prosperity during his first term. His next four years may be more difficult considering the challenges we face both at home and abroad.
Trump would do well to pattern his presidency after that of Eisenhower who gave the country eight years of peace and prosperity with the exception of a brief recession for a few months in 1958.
Eisenhower did it even though he had only had a Republican Congress during his first two years. He did it in significant part by being tough enough to issue 181 vetoes (only two of which were overridden), and issuing 484 executive orders.
Eisenhower was probably the most anti-war president we have ever had, and he brought the Korean War to an end. Hopefully, Trump will end this sad, unnecessary, stupid war in Ukraine.
The speech that Eisenhower is most remembered for is his farewell address given on national television on the evening of January 17, 1961. He talked of the “grave implications” of “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”
Then he added these famous words: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Less famous are these words from the same speech: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.”
He added: “Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
In Eisenhower’s first major speech after his inaugural address, he spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington on April 16, 1953. This was probably the most anti-war speech ever given by an American President.
He said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all… it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
This speech is quoted above Eisenhower’s grave and is also quoted in a book by Brett Baier entitled Three Days In January – Dwight Eisenhower’s Final Mission.”
Throughout most of my life, I assumed that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II and saved American lives. In Baier’s book, he writes this about plans to drop atomic bombs: “The idea sickened Ike.”
He told of a meeting with Secretary of War Henry Stimson: “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives… Japan was, at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.” He later expressed his “strong disagreement” to Truman.
Trump will probably feel pressure from the military-industrial complex, the Israel Lobby, and even some people around him and members of Congress who want to be modern-day Winston Churchills and fight some war someplace.
I hope that President Trump will be strong enough to resist these pressures and that he will leave office after his second term known as a president of peace like Eisenhower.
Reprinted with author’s permission from the Knoxville Focus.
