- The Washington Times - Saturday, October 28, 2017

President Trump applauded former President Jimmy Carter on Saturday for agreeing that the news media has been tougher on the current commander in chief than anyone else to have held the nation’s highest office.

“Just read the nice remarks by President Jimmy Carter about me and how badly I am treated by the press (Fake News),” Mr. Trump tweeted. “Thank you Mr. President!”

Mr. Carter, a Democrat who served as president from 1977-1981, told The New York Times earlier this month that he believes the media has been harder on Mr. Trump than any past president.

“I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about,” said Mr. Carter, 93. “I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.”

Mr. Trump has decried the news media since before taking office and has routinely lashed out publicly at press reports critical of his administration in the ninth months since entering the White House.

“No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly,” Mr. Trump said in May.

Mr. Carter’s comment last week came on the heels of two of his fellow living former presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, giving separate speeches on Oct. 19 that appeared to target Mr. Trump’s policies without mentioning him by name.

“We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism, forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America,” said Mr. Bush, a Republican. “We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade, forgetting that conflict, instability and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism. We’ve seen the return of isolationist sentiments, forgetting that American security is directly threatened by the chaos and despair of distant places.”

“What we can’t have is the same old politics of division that we have seen so many times before that dates back centuries,” said Mr. Obama, a Democrat. “Some of the politics we see now, we thought we put that to bed. That has folks looking 50 years back. It’s the 21st century, not the 19th century. Come on!”

Mr. Trump, on his part, hasn’t always spoken kindly of his predecessors, Mr. Carter included. In 2013, Mr. Trump tweeted that Mr. Carter “is so happy that he is no longer considered the worst President in the history of the United States!”

• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.

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