Former President Jimmy Carter grinned in the Oval Office in January 2009 for a photograph, a visible gap separating him from four of his successors. As the others stood shoulder to shoulder, he positioned himself off to the side, a hand in one pocket, as if to distance himself just slightly from that most exclusive club.

Carter had no qualms about breaking one of that club’s unwritten rules, namely that former Presidents restrain their critiques of the current occupant of the Oval Office. In the four decades after leaving the White House following the 1980 election, he caused regular stirs with pointed opinions about his successors.

“He was in fights with everyone, Democrats, Republicans,” said Julian E. Zelizer, the author of Jimmy Carter and a historian at Princeton University, who called Carter “a maverick through and through”.

Stuart Eizenstat, a former adviser to Carter, said the former President wasn’t the type of person to just go back to Plains, Georgia, and “work on carpentry and painting”.

“When he left office, he was in his mid-50s,” Eizenstat said. “He didn’t want his voice to be unheard.”

Ronald Reagan

The animosity between the men, biographers said, can be attributed to Reagan constantly using Carter as a foil, dismissing policies Carter prioritised and largely bucking his practice of briefing his predecessors.

After Reagan handily won a heated election, Carter initially refrained from criticising the new President. But it was not long before the two men began to trade barbs.

To Carter, Reagan’s budget cuts and environmental policies were “ill-advised” and “misguided”, and his administration was an “aberration on the political scene” that had abandoned American leadership and commitments to human rights. And, he said, Reagan had “never accepted responsibility” for lack of progress in West Asia peace, for budget deficits or trade imbalances, for the deaths of American soldiers in Beirut or “for anything that’s unpleasant”.

When the Iran-Contra affair came to light, Carter accused Reagan of “damaging the institution of the presidency” and “making believe that he’s telling the truth” about the scandal and calling the affair more serious than Watergate.

“Allowing Ronald Reagan to become President was by far my biggest failure in office,” Carter later told the historian Douglas Brinkley in his book The Unfinished Presidency.

George Bush

Theirs was a productive and respectful alliance — “an almost perfect relationship,” Carter said in 1989 — until the first Gulf War.

Whereas Reagan boxed out Carter, Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, sought Carter’s advice, dispatched him on diplomatic missions and pursued a West Asia policy that Carter thought was more in line with his own. Their views didn’t always align, however.

“There was very much I liked about Bush,” Carter told Brinkley. “But his belief that democracy comes through bombs instead of food and medicine and the ballot box was not one of them.”

Carter reserved much of his criticism of Bush for private correspondence, writing to senators and the leaders of the countries in the United Nations Security Council to urge them against joining American war efforts in the Persian Gulf.

In November 1990 — amid the military buildup before Operation Desert Storm began two months later — Carter said Bush had initially handled the situation “extremely well”. At the same time, he urged caution against an invasion that he said would lead to “serious and deleterious political consequences”.

Bill Clinton

The relationship between the two men had been strained since 1980 when Clinton lost his re-election campaign for governor of Arkansas and attributed his loss to Carter’s decision to send Cuban refugees to his state.

Things did not improve when, days before Clinton’s inauguration, Carter said he was “very disappointed” that the first daughter, Chelsea, would not be attending public school in Washington.

“This enrages the Clintons and they cut Carter out of as many of the inauguration events as they can,” said Jonathan Alter, author of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter. "You could write a whole book on them.”

Carter’s diplomatic peacekeeping mission to North Korea in 1994 further irritated Clinton and his aides, who saw the former President as “a freelance secretary of state”, Alter said. It did not help when Carter told The New York Times that September that he was “ashamed” of his country’s policy in Haiti.

In a 1995 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Carter also accused Clinton of inconsistency, arguing that he had issued empty threats to veto Republican legislation, shifted “from one major issue to another” and “abandoned” efforts to overhaul the country’s health care system.

George W. Bush

The Iraq war dominated Carter’s condemnations of the younger Bush.

Six months into Bush’s first term, Carter said he was “disappointed in almost everything he has done”.

The criticisms turned sharper once the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003. The war, Carter said, was “a completely unjust adventure” based on “lies or misinterpretations”, and the Bush administration had squandered the US's reputation as a champion of freedom and justice through “a virtually unbroken series of mistakes and miscalculations”.

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Carter said in 2007.

Barack Obama

Though Carter endorsed Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary and continued to praise him, he did not spare Obama from the occasional barb.

Drone strikes conducted under Obama showed “how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended”, Carter wrote in a 2012 New York Times opinion essay.

In 2015, Carter offered a mixed review of the Obama administration: “I think he’s done some good things domestically like the health programme and so forth, but on the world stage, just to be as objective about it as I can, I can’t think of many nations in the world where we have a better relationship now than we did when he took over.”

Donald J. Trump

In the first months of Trump’s presidency, Carter stayed curiously reticent on the man whom many describe as his polar opposite. But later, he characterised Trump as illegitimate and a liar.

After lamenting that Trump’s 2016 campaign had “tapped a waiting reservoir there of inherent racism”, Carter earned a tweet of appreciation from the former President when he said that the “media have been harder” on Trump than any of his predecessors.

By 2019, Carter was no longer holding back. Trump, he said, was “put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf” and his re-election would be a “disaster”.

Joe Biden

The two men were longtime political allies, and Carter offered some praise for Biden’s presidency.

Asked in the summer of 2021 how he thought Biden was faring, Carter noted that immigration, China and the Democrats’ legislative agenda remained challenges but said that “in general, Joe Biden has done very well”.

“With Biden in office and with the inherent qualities of the American people’s judgment, I would say I’m fairly optimistic about the future,” he said.

New York Times News Service