If there’s one thing Donald Trump cannot do it is let somebody else have the spotlight, even a dead president on his last journey through the Capitol, this time in state. One truism of the past nine years of Trump (ten if you want to count the rumblings he made about running before he announced in June, 2015) is that the man knows almost nothing of American history or politics. But like the child he is, he seeks to sound knowledgable about these topics. Trump knows nothing of the Panama Canal but that’s not an interesting headline. Claiming Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan because of the issue is interesting. Completely wrong, first time anybody’s ever heard of it, but Trump likes the sound of it and God knows MAGA doesn’t know what’s what. So whatever Trumpty says, goes, per usual. (There’s a video with this Skyline News tweet. Hit the tweet if you don’t see the video.)
🔴 Donald Trump:
The Panama Canal is of vital importance and is operated by China. I believe Jimmy Carter lost his election because they gave away the Panama Canal.#BREAKING #Trump pic.twitter.com/OjRijcMHLl
— Skyline News (@_SkylineNews) January 7, 2025
This idiot is going to be president AGAIN. That's the horror. We made a colossal mistake once. But to make it TWICE? The mind reels. And the stomach churns.
— Ursula Faw (@ursulafaw56) January 8, 2025
The awfulness here is that the Panama Canal was a Carter achievement and this stupid buffoon is mischaracterizing it as a calamity — and where is the pushback from legacy media? Anybody know?
I have no idea where Trump got this idea, but it makes little sense. The Panama Canal Treaty, initially negotiated by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, was signed and ushered through the Senate by Carter in April 1978. It was ratified by a 68 to 32 margin, with Republican Senate leader Howard Baker playing a key role (conservative icon William F. Buckley was another key backer of the treaty). Yes, the treaty was initially unpopular, but it became less so after its ratification. And while Ronald Reagan opposed the treaty, and made it a campaign issue against incumbent Republican Ford during the 1978 GOP primaries, it wasn’t a big deal at all by 1980, as Ron Elving recently observed at NPR:
Reagan remained opposed to the Panama deal but “noticeably muted his rhetoric in 1977 when the treaties were finally signed by President Jimmy Carter,” according to Lou Cannon, the reporter and biographer who covered Reagan more closely and for longer than anyone. In President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, Cannon reports that “Reagan’s interest in the Panama Canal declined after the issue had served its political purpose.” Cannon has written that Reagan’s pollster told him the issue was primarily of interest to hard-core conservatives. By 1980, Reagan had that category locked up.
If the treaty had been calamitous for Carter, you’d think he would have paid a big price during the 1978 midterm elections that immediately followed the Senate debate on the subject, but in fact, Republican gains in those midterms were modest, despite a lot of other issues bedeviling Democrats, along with a historic realignment that was already underway in Carter’s home region.
Indeed, contra Trump’s assumption that foreign policy cost Carter the White House in 1980, there were plenty of more prominent reasons for the outcome aside from the much-discussed and deeply embarrassing hostage crisis. The economy was in terrible shape in 1980, with an unemployment rate of 7.1 percent, an average inflation rate of 12.67 percent, and average home-mortgage rates of 13.74 percent. That alone almost certainly doomed Carter’s reelection. But aside from that, he had to weather a tough primary challenge from Ted Kennedy; a third-party candidacy from ex-Republican John Anderson that wound up taking away more votes from the incumbent than from the challenger; and an inevitable loss of support in southern-inflected parts of the country following his precedent-breaking win in 1976.
Subsequently Reagan did nothing to unravel the Panama Canal Treaty, and by the time the canal was fully turned over to Panama at the end of 1999 (with Carter present), it was a largely noncontroversial event.
For his own mysterious reasons, Trump clearly wants to inflate the significance in American politics of the Panama Canal issue, past and present. Unfortunately, the main participants in the debate over the Canal Treaty aren’t around to dispute his claims. It’s a shame that Trump has chosen to cast a shadow on Carter’s state funeral later this week by mischaracterizing one of his key accomplishments as a career-ending disaster.
Precisely. We can only hope and pray that mainstream media will correct the record — unless of course Patrick Soon-Siong and Jeff Bezos are convinced that will upset Donald, in which case don’t look for simple historical facts in the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times. Those two billionaire owners will want to find a “fair and balanced” “other side” to the issue. There is no other side. There is the truth and there are lies. Or, there is hiding the plain truth, which is a form of lying.
JFC. What a world we live in.
Every tyrant has a pretext for his tyranny. Aesop