In his rambling press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, Donald Trump said some very curious things, to put it mildly. One claim about Jimmy Carter, which he repeated twice, is just wrong. Following up on his recent threats to retake control of the Panama Canal if Panama doesn’t lower shipping fees and eliminate any Chinese involvement in managing the passageway, the president-elect asserted that Carter lost his reelection bid in 1980 primarily due to his sponsorship of the treaty that returned the canal to Panama.
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.
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