Don Gagne

Trump has come to a county that is home to a large number of factories and design facilities for the U.S. automobile industry. As such, there is a large contingent of union autoworkers here who support the president. Among them, you find strong backing for Trump's tariff policies. They believe Trump, when he says tariffs, will bring tens of thousands of jobs back to places like Michigan.

Still, even with the focus here on tariffs, it's common to hear people lined up outside the rally cite tough immigration policies and deportations as the thing Trump has done that they're happiest with so far. Don Garnier, NPR News, Macomb County, Michigan.

It absolutely did. And he was involved in the subsequent years in mediating disputes between the U.S. State Department and some of the most volatile foreign leaders, including Kim Il-sung of North Korea and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. In 1994, he assisted the U.S. government and helped settle a tension-filled nuclear weapons dispute with North Korea.

And Carter, along with his wife, Rosalyn, and she was very much a part of every single bit of this. The two of them regularly monitored election results around the globe to promote democracy.

Boy, it's an understatement to say he was a relative unknown, right? He was from Plains, Georgia, population 236 back in the 1970s. He had been a state senator. He had been recently governor of Georgia. He was a former peanut farmer. So I found this great tape from December of 1973 when I was working on an obit about Carter and And the tape kind of highlights how unknown he really was.

And Rachel, if I can jump in here, Carter always said his values were instilled in him when he was a child. His mom, Ms. Lillian, she was a nurse by training. She set an example for her son by defying lines of segregation in 1920s Georgia to counsel poor African-American women on matters of health care.

Then another organization Carter worked tirelessly for right up until recently was Habitat for Humanity International, an organization that works worldwide to provide housing for underprivileged people. In 2019, NPR spoke with Linda Fuller-Dagelman. She founded Habitat for Humanity with her husband, Millard. They convinced the Carters to do a work week with them.

And Daigleman has a wonderful story of that first work trip.

Exactly. Just to fill people in, the guinea worm is a parasite that infects people who drink contaminated water. So Carter took up the cause, meeting with government officials, health officials, aid groups around the world, fighting for clean water in developing countries. And under his leadership, this parasite, which infected millions in the 1980s, is today almost, almost eradicated.

In an interview with NPR before his death, the legendary global health worker, Paul Farmer, he's co-founder of Partners in Health, he spoke about the impact that Carter has had.

Here I am introducing that tape in that obit. He was hardly a household name. In fact, as his time in the statehouse wound down, he popped up on the TV game show, What's My Line?

On the show, a panel of celebrities tries to guess the profession of the mystery person sitting right in front of them. So there's Governor Carter on the set, smiling that famous Jimmy Carter smile, and the panelists have no idea who he is.

So what you hear, Rachel, are these celebrity panelists asking Jimmy Carter what he does for a living and trying to figure out. And they go on and on with different questions to him, trying to figure out what his profession is. Again, they had no clue who this guy was.

Right. And he did kind of use that humility. He directly confronted the cynicism that a lot of Americans were feeling at the time. He was modest, and that sounds like a strange thing to say. This is a modest person seeking the White House. But he did portray a certain modesty as a candidate.

He promised the people—again, this is in the wake of Watergate—he promised the people he would never lie to them. He promised to restore basic trust in the nation's institutions. It all sounds so old-fashioned, right? Right, right. It's also important to note that he ran a real grassroots campaign. He kind of embraced the fact that nobody knew him. Listen to this quote. It's from Steve Hockman.

He is from the Carter Center. And he was one of Carter's longtime assistants back then. And he told NPR in an interview that Carter worked hard at that basic retail campaigning.

So that's election night. Months later, he takes the oath of office, and he made his values clear right from the earliest moments of his presidency. In fact, he began his inaugural address by acknowledging the man that he had just defeated, Gerald Ford. For myself.

And then on the very next day, his first full day in office, January 21st, 1977, Carter did something else. He issued a mass pardon for all Vietnam War draft evaders.

It was not an easy time, and these are all difficult things for a new president to inherit. And as he promised he would do, Carter spoke directly about these things and honestly to the nation. He didn't sugarcoat it. And specifically, he told the public something that presidents don't often tell the public, that they need to sacrifice. In this case, he said they need to conserve energy.

So Carter did not lack self-confidence. That's something also worth noting here. And To that end, politically, he did stuff presidents didn't often do. And sometimes it was to his own detriment politically, right? One prominent example, again, this deals with the energy crisis. As president, he tried to get Americans to wear sweaters.

It sounds almost comical now, but he literally encouraged people to wear sweaters so they could turn down the thermostat and save energy. Wow. did that in the White House, turning down the heat of the executive mansion and wearing a sweater and being seen on television wearing a cardigan sweater. But here's the catch. Americans didn't necessarily want to hear this, right?

They wanted him to fix things. They didn't want him to tell them what they needed to do. And I think because he was advising conservation rather than a clear set of policy principles that would offer a solution, people maybe began to think of him as not as strong of a leader as he needed to be.

And some of them even saw him as kind of a scold, telling them how they needed to go about their daily lives.

Oh, he absolutely did. Let's just tick off a few of them. He created the Department of Energy and was the first president to really lay out a national energy policy. He signed on foreign policy the SALT II Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union, and he mediated one of the most difficult

political crises of the time by bringing together Egypt's President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. He brought them to Camp David. He got these two leaders in the Middle East to sign a peace accord that led to Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula

and the establishment of diplomatic relations between these two countries that had long been at odds, at war, in conflict. So that was a very big deal.

Yeah, and we don't want to take too big of a detour here, but it's worth noting his younger brother, his youngest sibling, Benjamin, Billy was a Southern good old boy who had a habit of leveraging his connection to his brother to make a buck. He endorsed a beer bearing his own name, Billy Beer, and that was during Carter's presidential campaign. So it started right away.

It seemed like he was always in the news for the wrong reasons, and the White House had to deal with it. Billy did create one major headache, though, when He became an agent of the government of Libya. And Muammar Gaddafi was in power then. And after multiple trips, he was paid hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And he became the center of this kind of swirling storm of allegations about influence peddling. And if all of that wasn't enough in the midst of all this, Billy Carter even kind of responded to all of that by using his Libya connections to sell ice cream.

You had these countervailing things, right? All the positive nature of the Bicentennial, but the Vietnam War had just wound down literally in the previous year. On top of all of that, the country was in the midst of an energy crisis. There was lots of cynicism among the American people. To take you back to those days, President Gerald Ford was an incumbent president

Wait, what? And that kind of sums it up. He was stubborn, and the scandal did create some problems for President Carter, who at one point was in the midst of a difficult campaign, both for renomination and for re-election.

Yeah. And for the record here, Jimmy Carter never used the word malaise in this speech, but he was talking about kind of a malaise that the country was in, a funk that the country was in, right? And again, we keep coming back to the energy crisis. That's what this speech was meant to address. And it was... It was aimed at instilling some urgency on the issue.

But Carter ultimately said he got stuck on this question. He said, why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problems? So he's raising big things there.

Right, and the public, again, did not want to hear that, and they kind of saw a lack of confidence in him as well, as part of that.

This was probably the defining moment in the public's eyes, right, of the Carter presidency. Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and detained more than 50 Americans on staff there. The Iranians held the American diplomats and staff hostage for 444 days.

And again, this spilled over into an American election year, 1980. Diplomatic relations to end the standoff failed. So Carter tried something. He ordered the U.S. military to attempt a rescue mission. That mission failed. and it resulted in the accidental deaths of eight Americans, American service personnel, in the desert after one of the helicopters crashed into another transport aircraft.

And political analysts really did cite that standoff and that moment as a major factor in the ongoing decline and downfall of Carter's presidency.

He did indeed. He lost election to a former Hollywood actor and a former California governor, Ronald Reagan. It was a landslide win. Carter left office, though, I have to say, as graciously as he began his term. You know that defeat really, really affected him. But here he is in his farewell speech. The love of liberty.

running for a full term in office. Recall that he'd inherited the presidency two years earlier in 1974 when a disgraced Richard Nixon resigned from office as the Watergate scandal just closed in around him.

I've been in and around Allegheny County these past couple of days and in West Mifflin where a key U.S. Steel facility is located. So let's start there with the local mayor. His name is Chris Kelly.

And he made it clear they were tears of joy he's talking.

Yeah, he's lived it. He grew up in a nearby town where he says it was decades of decline. He says one mill after another closed and more than 200,000 jobs disappeared.

And he sees the new investments from Nippon Steel as new life.

So most are only just learning some of the details, but it's being welcomed for lots of reasons. I met 55-year-old Malik Swain outside a local restaurant. He said it's good news, including what updating these old mills will mean for the environment.

I do want to note here that the United Steelworkers, the national union, has long been opposed to Nippon coming in, citing national security and allegations of unfair trade practices.

And that was a big reason during the campaign last year that both candidate Trump and President Biden opposed this proposed deal with Nippon Steel. Now, though, such concerns seem to be overridden by the prospect of more jobs. But listen to this. I heard this from a local resident. His name is Mike Medich. I'm glad it's Japan rather than China.

because China has a lot of investments in our country, which I don't think they should have. And I'll add here that Medich doesn't necessarily see this as a big engine for new jobs, but he says had this mill closed, that would have been a real blow to the community.

It's a pleasure.

Where to start? You first. We expected a lot. of aggressive action from the Trump administration right from the jump, because that's what they told us they would do. And we really are in a place where the fire hose is turned on. And every day, as you said, it is multiple big things.

Now we get the legal battles. A judge ruled that the White House could not do what it did, that there are so many questions unresolved about who has the authority to cut these jobs, where the funding to pay workers comes, through September, as proposed for some would come from. So look for direction from the courts, but that may not stop the administration.

And now on top of this comes the judge's order regarding Treasury Department data, overnight data on individual citizens. We are going to see a lot of this, and we still don't know if or how the White House will view orders that they comply with the courts.

And those tariffs were set to go in place this past week. The White House called a 30-day pause on all of that. But yes, the threat really does still exist. And economists will tell you that the tariffs would be very destructive to economies on both sides of the border. Detroit, Windsor, that's the city right across the Detroit River, is the nation's busiest border crossing.

Automobile parts flow across that border. Production schedules depend on that. Tens of thousands of jobs depend on that. There are civic and business partnerships of all kinds across the Detroit River. And all of that's just the start of it. So nobody has relaxed at all.

Dearborn is a majority Arab American city. Biden won big there in 2020. But this last election, it was close, but it went for Trump largely because of anger over the war in Gaza and the Biden administration's support for Israel. Again, it's not that these voters had great hopes for Trump, but they did seem caught off guard by remarks like what we just heard.

People, to me, expressed offense no matter how they voted. Offended Trump saying Gaza would be taken over by the U.S. Offended at the call to relocate Gaza's population. offended at the reference to it as a future Riviera. And there has been, Scott, some finger pointing and blaming those who voted for Trump, but also even toward those who abstained, maybe stayed uncommitted.

So it has been a difficult week in places like Dearborn, Michigan.

It's a pleasure. Thanks, Scott.