ATLANTA, Ga. — Jimmy Carter‘s extended public farewell began Saturday in Georgia, with the 39th U.S. president’s flag-draped casket tracing his long arc from the Depression-era South and family farming business to the pinnacle of American political power and decades as a global humanitarian.
Those chapters shone throughout the opening stanza of a six-day state funeral intended to blend personalized memorials with the ceremonial pomp afforded to former presidents. The longest-lived U.S. executive, Carter died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100.
“He was an amazing man. He was held up and propped up and soothed by an amazing woman,” son James Earl “Chip” Carter III, told mourners at The Carter Center late Saturday afternoon, referring to his father and former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who died in 2023. “The two of them together changed the world. And it was an amazing thing to watch so close.”
Grandson Jason Carter, who now chairs the center’s governing board, said, “It’s amazing what you can cram into a hundred years.”
Carter’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren accompanied their patriarch as his hearse rode first Saturday through his hometown of Plains, which at about 700 residents is not much bigger than when Carter was born there Oct. 1, 1924. The procession stopped at the farm where the future president toiled alongside the Black sharecroppers who worked for his father. The motorcade continued to Atlanta, stopping in front of the Georgia Capitol where Carter served as a state senator and reformist governor.
Finally, he arrived for his last visit to the Carter Presidential Center, which houses his presidential library and The Carter Center where he based his post-White House advocacy for public health, democracy and human rights, setting a new standard for what former presidents can accomplish after they yield power.
“His spirit fills this place,” Jason Carter told the assembly that included some of the center’s 3,000 employees worldwide. “You continue the vibrant living legacy of what is my grandfather’s life work,” he added.
Pallbearers on Saturday came from the Secret Service that protected the Carters for almost a half-century and a military honor guard that included Navy servicemembers for the only U.S. Naval Academy graduate to reach the Oval Office. A military band played “Hail to the Chief” and the hymn “Be Thou My Vision” for the commander in chief who also was a devout Baptist.
His longtime personal pastor, the Rev. Tony Lowden, remembered not a president but the frail man who spent the last 22 months in hospice care, “wrapped in a blanket” that included the words of Psalm 23.
Chip Carter recalled “the boss” he had to make an appointment to see in the Oval Office, but also the father who spent an entire Christmas break learning Latin and teaching his 8th-grade son who had failed a test. When he took that test again, the younger Carter said, he aced it: “I owed it to my father, who spent that kind of time with me.”
Jimmy Carter will lie in repose at the Carter Presidential Center from 7 p.m. Saturday through 6 a.m. Tuesday, with the public able to pay respects around the clock.
Scott Lyle, an engineer who grew up in Georgia but now lives in New York, was among the first mourners to pay his respects. Lyle said he joined Carter to build homes with Habitat for Humanity for the first time in LaGrange, Georgia, in 2003. Since then, he has traveled around the world to build houses with the group.
“I got to see, what some people don’t get to see, close. He was an amazing man, and he cared about others. He walked the walk,” said Lyle, who was wearing Carter-themed Habitat gear. “And I can’t think of anyone else that I would want to stand in line to pay my respects for.”
National rites will continue in Washington and conclude Thursday with a funeral at Washington National Cathedral, followed by a return to Plains. There, the former president will be buried next to his wife of 77 years near the home they built before his first state Senate campaign in 1962.
The Carters lived nearly all their lives in Plains, with the exception of his Naval service, four years in the Governor’s Mansion and four years in the White House. As his hearse rolled through the town, mourners lined the main street, some holding bouquets of flowers and wearing pins bearing images of the former president and his signature smile.
Willie Browner, 75, described Carter as hailing from a bygone era of American politics.
“This man, he thought of more than just himself,” said Browner, who grew up in the town of Parrott, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from Plains. Browner said it meant “a great deal” to have a president come from a small Southern town like his — something he worries isn’t likely to happen again.
Indeed, Carter helped plan his own funeral to emphasize that his remarkable rise to the world stage was because of — not despite — his deep rural roots.
Over the course of a few blocks in Plains, the motorcade passed near where the Carters ran the family peanut warehouse, and the small home where his mother, a nurse, had delivered the future first lady in 1927. The hearse passed the old train depot that served as Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign headquarters — a barebones effort that depended on public financing, dwarfed by the billion-dollar U.S. presidential campaigns of the 21st century.
At the Carter farm, a few dozen National Park Service rangers stood in formation in front of the home, which did not have running water or electricity when Carter was a boy. The old farm bell rang 39 times to honor Carter’s place as the 39th president.
Beside the house, there remains the tennis court that Carter’s father, James Earl Carter Sr., built for the family — a nod to the blend of privilege and hard rural life that defined the future president’s upbringing. Carter worked the land throughout the Great Depression, but it was owned by the elder Carter, who employed the surrounding Black tenant farmers during the era of Jim Crow segregation.
Carter wrote and spoke extensively on those formative years and how the abject poverty and institutional racism he saw influenced his policies in government and human rights work.
Calvin Smyre, a former Georgia legislator, remembered that legacy Saturday at the state Capitol. Smyre, who is Black, said Carter’s repudiation of racial segregation allowed Black people to wield power in Georgia.
“We stand on the shoulder of courageous people like Jimmy Carter,” Smyre said. “What he did shocked and shook the political ground here in the state of Georgia. And we live better because of that.”
The arms transfer could be the final one the Biden administration provides to Israel. President Biden has largely ignored critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza who have urged a halt to weapons aid.
A cartoonist has decided to quit her job at the Washington Post after an editor rejected her sketch of the newspaper’s owner and other media executives bowing before President-elect Donald Trump.
Ann Telnaes posted a message
Friday on the online platform Substack saying that she drew a cartoon showing a group of media executives bowing before Trump while offering him bags of money, including Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Telnaes wrote that the cartoon was intended to criticize “billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.” Several executives, Bezos among them, have been spotted at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago. She accused them of having lucrative government contracts and working to eliminate regulations.
Telnaes said that she’s never before had a cartoon rejected because of its inherent messaging and that such a move is dangerous for a free press.
“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable,” Telnaes wrote. “For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’”
The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists issued a statement Saturday accusing the Post of “political cowardice” and asking other cartoonists to post Telnaes’ sketch with the hashtag #StandWithAnn in a show of solidarity.
“Tyranny ends at pen point,” the association said. “It thrives in the dark, and the Washington Post simply closed its eyes and gave in like a punch-drunk boxer.”
The Post’s communications director, Liza Pluto, provided The Associated Press on Saturday with a statement from David Shipley, the newspaper’s editorial page editor. Shipley said in the statement that he disagrees with Telnaes’ “interpretation of events.”
He said he decided to nix the cartoon because the paper had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and was set to publish another.
“Not every editorial judgement is a reflection of a malign force. … The only bias was against repetition,” Shipley said.
President Joe Biden rewarded one of the Left’s most influential and notorious donors Saturday, giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros
.
The White House announced the honor in a list of 19 recipients, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and LGBTQ megadonor Tim Gill.
Biden framed Soros’ funding as philanthropy in service of “democracy” and “social justice.”
“George Soros is an investor, philanthropist, and founder of the Open Society Foundations,” the White House explained
. “Through his network of foundations, partners and projects in more than 120 countries, Soros has focused on global initiatives that strengthen democracy, human rights, education, and social justice.”
Soros, a Hungarian-American billionaire investor, has funneled more than $15.2 billion through his Open Society Foundations (now run by his son Alex), which has awarded more than 50,000 grants worldwide, according to the World Economic Forum
.
Soros bankrolled the “rogue prosecutor” soft-on-crime movement
by funding the campaigns of local prosecutors who oppose the death penalty and use prosecutorial discretion to avoid charging crimes they consider minor.
Crime rates have spiked across the country, particularly in Democrat-led cities, where murder rates have increased
.
Yet it makes a perverse amount of sense that Biden would grant Soros
the highest civilian honor—not because the billionaire has funded a movement that puts Americans in danger but because his massive funding network enabled Biden’s allies to implement their radical agenda through the administrative state.
As the Competitive Enterprise Institute
pointed out, during calendar year 2023, agencies in the federal government issued 3,018 rules, while Congress only enacted 68 laws, many of them ceremonial. In other words, agencies issued 44 rules for every law enacted by Congress. While the Constitution gives the people’s elected representatives in Congress the ability to make law, the administrative state issues far more rules that impact Americans’ daily lives.
Activist groups bankrolled through Soros’ Open Society Foundations have worked to remake the federal government in the image of pink-haired college students steeped in gender studies and protesting Israel on campus.
The Biden administration has kowtowed to gender ideology
, rewriting federal education law to force schools to allow boys in girls’ restrooms and even directing federal law enforcement to refer to illegal aliens by their preferred pronouns. The administration opened the border after groups like the Center for American Progress urged bureaucrats to transform the Department of Homeland Security into a welcome mat for illegals. Biden signed an election executive order that had effectively been written by the activist group Demos, and then the administration brought in Demos to help implement it!
Soros’ fingerprints—along with those of his son—are all over these and other efforts to push woke ideology
in the federal government.
The Open Society Foundations had funneled millions to the Center for American Progress
, a hub of left-wing advocacy and woke influence in the federal government. Different arms of the Open Society Foundations have funded Demos, the LGBTQ activist group the Human Rights Campaign, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among many others.
Biden’s decision to honor Tim Gill also echoes this woke funding. Gill has poured millions into the LGBTQ activist movement, including in an effort to prevent social conservatives from opting out of celebrating same-sex weddings.
“We’re going to punish the wicked,” Gill told Rolling Stone
in 2017. After the 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage across the country, Gill turned his activism apparatus against religious freedom restoration acts and toward a legal mentality that would penalize Christians, and anyone else in business, who refuse to participate in a same-sex wedding.
Gill’s mentality echoes the Human Rights Campaign
, which uses a Corporate Equality Index to shame companies into taking extreme LGBTQ stances that alienate customers (see Target and Bud Light in 2023). When HRC asked the Biden administration to jump via a set of policy recommendations in 2021, the bureaucrats effectively responded by asking, “How high?”
It also echoes the Southern Poverty Law Center, which suggests mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits are similarly hateful to the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC has put religious freedom groups like Alliance Defending Freedom on a “hate map” alongside KKK chapters, and SPLC leaders have advised the Biden administration in combatting “domestic terrorism.”
The vast network of woke NGOs Soros props up have enabled Biden to seed his far-left ideology throughout the federal government, and President-elect Donald Trump has his work cut out for him if he wants to root this out
.
By awarding Soros this honor, Biden is rewarding one of his most influential ideological allies—a fitting if disgusting final chapter for this far-left administration.
The 119th Congress has yet to be sworn in, but Democrats are already plotting how to take the gavel back from Speaker Mike Johnson and his noxious Republican conference.
House Majority PAC, a super PAC that seeks to elect Democrats to the House, announced
its top 29 targets for the 2026 midterms, as well as another 16 reach seats that could be in play in the right political environment.
The group—which touted its 2024 track record of helping Democrats net a seat in the House despite the fact that Donald Trump won the popular vote nationwide—said it will begin by recruiting and vetting strong candidates in target districts.
“Headed into the midterms with lessons learned from 2024, HMP is today launching a 2026 Recruitment Fund—which will allow us to recruit and prepare potential candidates earlier than ever,” the group said in a news release. “With Republicans like [New York Rep.] Mike Lawler, [Arizona Rep.] Juan Ciscomani, [Michigan Rep.] John James, and potentially others likely leaving their seats, we must ensure Democratic campaigns are set up for success—and that comes through conducting qualitative and quantitative research to develop specific messaging and strategies for individual races.”
A few of the districts House Majority PAC is working to field strong recruits for include:
Colorado’s 8th District, where Democrats lost to Rep.-elect Gabe Evans by less than 1 point
.
Iowa’s 1st District, where GOP Rep. Marionette Miller Meeks won by just 799 votes
.
Pennsylvania’s 7th District, where Democrats lost to Rep.-elect Ryan Mackenzie by 1 point
.
Pennsylvania’s 8th District, where Democrats lost to Rep.-elect Robert Bresnahan by less than 2 points
.
Pennsylvania’s 10th District, where Republican Rep. Scott Perry won by just 1.3 points
.
Nebraska’s 2nd District, where GOP Rep. Don Bacon was able to hold on by less than 2 points
, even as Vice President Kamala Harris carried the district.
On paper, the 2026 midterms should be a good year for House Democrats.
They need to flip just three seats in order to win back control of the House—something they came painfully close to doing in 2024. Democrats fell short this year in the three districts that determined the majority by a combined total of just 7,309 votes
.
And given that the party in the White House almost always loses seats in the first midterm
election, that puts Democrats in prime position to oust Johnson from the speaker’s office.
Democrats will have the added advantage in 2026 of being able to run against what is sure to be Republican dysfunction in Congress
, as the GOP will struggle to pass its agenda with a historically small majority
and fractious caucus of members who love to vote against legislation and refuse to make the compromises necessary to pass bills.
For at least the first few months of 2025, the GOP majority will be just one seat
, until special elections can be held to fill vacancies created by Trump nominating House lawmakers
to serve in his administration. That means Johnson cannot lose a single vote if every member shows up, as it would result in a 216-216 tie and a vote would fail.
That will make basic tasks—such as funding the government—a tightrope act for Johnson, as Republicans love to vote against spending deals and often have to rely on Democratic votes
to keep the government’s lights on.
In 2018, the first midterm of Trump’s first turn in the White House, Democrats ran on the Republican chaos
and gained 40
seats to win the majority—far more than the 23 the party needed to win the gavel.
Meanwhile, what Trump and the Republican majorities in Congress are promising to achieve is unlikely to be popular with the electorate.
“It has become increasingly apparent that many of my House Republican colleagues want to jam big tax cuts for the wealthy, the well-off and the well-connected down the throats of the American people and try to pay for those tax cuts, which will not benefit everyday Americans, by cutting Social Security and Medicare,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said at a Dec. 11 news conference on Capitol Hill.
“This is not a hypothetical. It’s not hype. It’s not hyperbole. It’s happening before our very eyes because extreme MAGA Republicans in the House are telling us, publicly and repeatedly, that’s exactly what they plan to do to the American people,” Jeffries warned. “House Democrats are clear we will oppose any effort to end Social Security and Medicare as we know it.”
Expect to hear that message a lot over the next two years.
