Trump screamed for hours after learning jet was shot down — fearing Jimmy Carter repeat

President Donald Trump is desperate to avoid the historical fate of President Jimmy Carter, whose administration is remembered for struggling with a bad economy and a hostile Iran.

“It was Good Friday afternoon in a nearly empty West Wing soon after the president learned that an American jet had been shot down in Iran, with two airmen missing. Trump screamed at aides for hours,” reported The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey. “The Europeans aren’t helping, he said repeatedly. Gas prices averaged $4.09. Images of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis—one of the biggest international policy failures of a presidency in recent times—had been looming large in his mind, people who have spoken to him said.”

The reporters quoted Trump saying in March about Carter's Democratic Party that “if you look at what happened with Jimmy Carter…with the helicopters and the hostages, it cost them the election. What a mess.” The current president was referring to how his predecessor was not able to free 52 Americans held as hostages by Iran until the very end of his administration, even losing US helicopters and servicemen during a failed rescue attempt.

“Speaking to Republican lawmakers in Doral, Fla., a little over a week into the [Iran] war, Trump ticked through Democratic presidents who oversaw foreign policy debacles, including the withdrawal from Afghanistan under President Joe Biden,” The Wall Street Journal reported. He then dwelled on Carter’s failed attempt to rescue U.S. hostages held by the same Iranian regime he was bombing.

Speaking with AlterNet, historian Rick Perlstein — whose 2020 book “Reaganland” chronicled Carter’s single term as president and how it laid the foundations for the empowerment of the far right through Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 election — explained that to the extent Carter can be compared to Trump, the analogy consistently redounds to Carter’s favor… despite the Democrat’s shortcomings as a president.

"Carter was very self-aware when it came to questions of humility,” Perlstein told AlterNet. I'm not saying he was humble—in fact, he had a very paradoxical relationship to humility—but he also understood his greatest flaw. He prayed for humility. He talks about how, when he prays, he prays for more humility. So I think that he had this kind of self-awareness that is 1000% different from Trump."

Carter himself seemed to agree that Trump was an inferior president. Speaking to this author for Salon in 2018, Carter said that “I think that under Trump the government is worse than it has been before. This is the first time I remember when the truth is ignored, allies are deliberately aggravated, China, Europe, Mexico and Canada are hurt economically and have to hurt us in response, Americans see the future worse than the present, and immigrants are treated cruelly."

After Carter died in late 2024, Trump refused to keep the flags at half-staff to honor his passing, as is traditional. Even though First Lady Melania Trump devoted part of her documentary to attending Carter’s memorial service, neither she nor the president discussed Carter’s legacy at all. When AlterNet reached out to the White House for comment on this story, they declined to reply.