Trump has made everything Jimmy Carter warned about catastrophically worse: analysis

President Donald Trump’s administration has vindicated a controversial 1979 speech delivered by one of his Democratic predecessors, Jimmy Carter.

This is the assessment of Steve Schmidt, who like Trump is a Republican and advised a fellow GOP president, George W. Bush. In his Sunday editorial about Carter — who died in 2024 and did not receive the traditional flag-at-half-staff treatment because Trump did not want it conflicting with his inauguration — Schmidt quoted a speech Carter delivered after talking with ordinary Americans at the height of America’s late 1970s inflation and oil scarcity crises.

As America confronts similar problems nearly half-a-century later, Schmidt quoted Carter’s famous “Crisis of Confidence” speech as he diagnosed what ailed America spiritually at this analogous period in American history.

“President Carter’s speech is interesting to read from the perspective of 2026 and the grave crisis facing American society that he clearly saw coming,” Schmidt wrote. “Jimmy Carter talked to the nation in a way no president before — or since — has. He asked something of the American people in the speech that has not been asked since. He asked for national introspection.”

Describing how Americans used to brim with hope for the future, Schmidt quoted Carter saying “Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.”

Describing America as a nation that used to value community, family, work and God, he said that “human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

Adding that most Americans did not vote and believed the next five years would be worse than the previous five years, Carter observed that “there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.”

Schmidt then concluded that Americans had not learned anything from Carter’s message.

“The challenge wasn’t met,” Schmidt wrote. “Every aspect of what President Carter talked about is worse in 2026. The crisis has been made horrendously worse by the advent of social media and technology that have further isolated, inflamed and narrowed the horizons of the American people.”

He added, “America is beset by a mental health crisis, a suicide crisis, a loneliness and disconnection crisis and a mass shooting epidemic that evidence rot, decay and immorality at an epic scale.”

Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2018, at the then-39th anniversary of his speech, Carter was asked about this passage from his speech. Like Schmidt, he said things are worse under Trump than they were when he was president.

“We still have the same crises of that time, plus a serious loss of faith in democracy, the truth, treating all people as equals, each generation believing life would be better, America has a good system of justice, etc.,” Carter said at the time. He highlighted one passage from the speech in particular.

“What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action,” Carter said in 1979. “You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests.”

“This is much worse than when I gave the speech,” Carter told me in 2018.