PBS News Hour

NICK SCHIFRIN: Good evening.

I'm Nick Schifrin.

Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz are away.

On the "News Hour" tonight: Remembering the life and legacy of former President Jimmy Carter one day after he died at 100 years old.

Crime in decline, the reasons behind a sharp drop in the number of murders in 2024.

And bucking the trend.

In a world of consumerism, social media users advocate for buying less.

DIANA WIEBE, Influencer: It's rejecting what influencers and the companies behind them are trying to get you to do, which is buy more and buy it right now.

Welcome to the "News Hour."

Former President Jimmy Carter tonight is being remembered as a humanitarian and statesman more than 40 years after leaving the White House.

The 39th president, who died yesterday at 100, will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol next week before his funeral at the Washington National Cathedral.

Laura Barron-Lopez begins our coverage.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Flags were lowered to half-staff across the country and around the world.

And Americans of all backgrounds paused to remember late former President Jimmy Carter.

REBECCA SCHMIDT, Mourning Jimmy Carter: Jimmy Carter has always been a hero of mine.

CHERYL JONES, California Resident: He was just a good man, a decent man, an honest man, something we don't see very much of anymore.

JIM DEWYEA, New York Resident: He was a great humanitarian.

He set the example for all of us, and we're going to miss him.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: From peanut farmer to president, Carter served one term in the White House from 1977 to 1981.

He brokered a historic peace deal between Israel and Egypt.

But an energy crisis at home and the kidnapping of 52 Americans in Iran led to his defeat in 1980.

Carter's life post-presidency was defined by his international humanitarian work.

He and his wife Rosalynn founded the Carter Center and he earned a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his diplomatic achievements.

Last night, President Biden broke from his family vacation to pay tribute to his longtime friend.

JOE BIDEN, President of the United States: Millions of people all around the world, all over the world feel they lost a friend as well, even though they never met him.

And that's because Jimmy Carter lived a life measured not by words, but by his deeds.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Former presidents from across the political spectrum also weighed in.

President-elect Donald Trump has been critical of Carter in the past, but he wrote last night that: "He truly loved and respected our country and all it stands for."

Former President Barack Obama said that Carter "believed some things were more important than reelection, things like integrity, respect and compassion."

The former president will be laid to rest in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, next to his wife of more than 75 years, Rosalynn, who passed away in 2023.

One of the couple's final public interviews was with the "News Hour"'s Judy Woodruff back in 2021.

JUDY WOODRUFF: As you think back on your presidency and your time as a former president, what are you most proud of?

And is there a big regret you have?

JIMMY CARTER, Former President of the United States: I would say that we did what we pledged to do in the campaign.

We kept the peace and we obeyed the law and we told the truth and we honored human rights.

Those were the things that were important to me.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Laura Barron-Lopez.

NICK SCHIFRIN: And for more on President Carter's life and legacy, I'm joined by Judy Woodruff, who you just saw there, and has covered the Carter's for more than 50 years, as well as James Fallows, Carter's speechwriter during the first two years of the administration, and Kai Bird, author of "The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter."

Thanks very much to all of you.

Welcome back to the "News Hour."

Judy, let me start with you.

Jimmy Carter grew up on a peanut farm, no electricity, no running water, the first member of his family to graduate high school.

Just remind us, how far was his journey to the White House?

JUDY WOODRUFF: It was the longest imaginable journey, Nick.

You're right, a peanut farm in the deepest of rural Southwest Georgia, Plains, the town that we have all come to identify with him, to reach the pinnacle, the most powerful job in the world, and, unimaginably, to leave office in a state of, if you will, political failure, not winning reelection.

But then here we are 44 years later, and we are celebrating the life, the legacy of this man who did come from that very simple beginning, but, against all odds, achieved everything that he achieved.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Kai Bird, against all odds?

As I said, you called your book "The Outlier."

How was Jimmy Carter an outlier?

KAI BIRD, Author, "The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter": Well, he was an outlier for all of the reasons that Judy just explained.

He came from these very spartan circumstances, no running water, an outhouse.

He was virtually raised in the 19th century, and now has lasted 100 years into the 21st century.

And he was an extraordinary man, but I think Judy and Jim will all agree that he was just relentless.

He was a workaholic.

He -- in the White House, he was devoted to figuring out the right thing to do and studying the memos.

He would read 200 or 300 pages a day.

And I don't know.

Jim saw him on a more daily basis.

I was just the biographer, but he could be a acerbic and difficult.

People have this warm and fuzzy thinking perception of him, but he was a tough guy to interview, precisely because he was so smart and quick and knowledgeable.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Jim Fallows, you wrote some of those memos.

You were in the White House at the beginning.

Carter came to power after the twin traumas of Vietnam and Watergate.

He promised never to lie and to help heal America.

At first, did it work?

JAMES FALLOWS, Former Speechwriter For President Jimmy Carter: It did work at first.

And I think something that's very difficult for people now in America, who think of Carter only as this grandfatherly figure wearing a cardigan, doing good works around the world, to imagine how magical he seemed when he came practically from nowhere in 1976.

I think he still has the record for the quickest ascent from 1 percent name recognition in the United States and one year later being sworn in as president.

And part of what he was able to do was because he seemed to capture the spirit of that times.

He was going to be honest.

He was hardworking.

He embraced all kinds of culture, black and white.

He was a military officer who also was against the Vietnam War.

He was a friend of Bob Dylan.

He quoted Dylan Thomas.

He had Martin Luther King Sr. as one of his supporters.

So there was some people would -- what Democrats would associate with early Barack Obama or Republicans perhaps with Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter had in a pure form when he first came onto the scene.

NICK SCHIFRIN: And yet, Judy Woodruff, as Jim Fallows just said, the magic of Carter's first days wore off.

His approval rating dropped from 70 percent to 28 percent from 1977 to 1978.

Was that in fact in part because of the outsider status, perhaps the outsider staff that he brought with him, and it helped create the impression among some that he was, frankly, out of his league?

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, I think it had a lot to do with the fact that he didn't really love the idea of bending to the ways of Washington.

He brought his team, largely a very loyal Georgia team, with him to Washington.

They surrounded him at the White House until about three years into the administration, when he finally did bring in some more Washington-experienced hands.

But you have to say the country was experiencing inflation.

Gas prices were high.

He was plagued in the last year of his presidency by the terrible Iran hostage crisis, where dozens of Americans at the embassy in Tehran were taken hostage, held for a year.

He had the failed helicopter -- the attempt to send in helicopters to rescue them that crashed.

There were so many things that happened that were bad luck.

And you could attribute it to his great ambition, his determination to make a difference against all odds.

But part of what happened, I would say, is the fact that he didn't want to bend.

He didn't want to do things the way Washington had always done it.

To him, it was more important to try to do -- quote -- "the right thing" than to worry about what was going to get him reelected.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Kai Bird, on foreign policy, Judy just mentioned the hostages, of course, in Iran, but a signature achievement of President Carter was a peace treaty that he personally helped seal between Egypt and Israel that stands to this day.

Do you believe that that is his crowning foreign policy achievement?

And how did he stay focused on Israel long after that?

KAI BIRD: Oh, that was a crowning achievement.

It was an extraordinary episode in personal diplomacy.

It just wouldn't have happened without Jimmy Carter.

And yet it was an achievement of a cold peace between Israel and Egypt.

But people should remember that Carter believed he also got an agreement, a road path to autonomy and maybe a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, and that Begin reneged on it.

And he spent the... (CROSSTALK) NICK SCHIFRIN: Begin, the prime minister of Israel, that signed the Camp David accords.

KAI BIRD: Yes.

And Carter just believed that Menachem Begin had promised him one thing and then walked out the door and reneged.

And he spent the rest of his life warning the Israelis that they were going down a road towards apartheid if they kept building settlements in the West Bank.

And, of course, that was not a popular thing to say.

But this is Jimmy Carter.

He is a prophet in the wilderness.

And prophets are often unpopular.

And he just -- he was -- he was relentless.

And I have to say, looking at where we are today, I think he's been proven correct.

And that's why we still have a terrible conflict in the Middle East today.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Israel, of course, denies that it's got anything to do with apartheid.

But I want to keep going.

Jim Fallows, his other foreign policy legacy is turning over the Panama Canal to Panama, something criticized not only by his opponent, President Reagan, eventually, but also recently by president-elect Trump.

We mentioned Iran, of course, normalization with China.

How much of Carter's legacy is defined by those topics and what was most important to him?

JAMES FALLOWS: So, I think, in addition to the Camp David accord, where I agree with what Kai Bird just said, I think that Carter would rank two other achievements near the top in foreign policy.

One was the Panama Canal treaties, which, interestingly, the first negotiations on that front had happened under Richard Nixon and at the urging of the U.S. military, which said that, unless there was some resolution of this colonialist presence in Panama, it was going to be impossible to defend the canal.

And Carter defended that.

And he pulled off a work of sort of political legerdemain that we don't usually associate with him in getting 68 votes in the Senate to ratify this, which involved getting a lot of Republicans to join him.

So I think that was important.

And, also, his human rights policy, which he announced during the campaign in a seminal speech at Notre Dame in his first year of the presidency, I think that will stand in the test of time as something that he -- in which he changed the world, part of what he's recognized for in the Nobel Peace Prize.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Yes, the only president of the United States to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work after being president.

Judy Woodruff, when you asked him about his legacy, human rights was one of the main things he brought up, not only during his presidency, but afterward, right?

JUDY WOODRUFF: That's right.

He was very proud of -- he was not one to Bragg, but he was very proud of his record in human rights, as Jim Fallows just described.

And he also said, we kept the peace.

And that was one of the central missions that the Carter has been and is today, one of the central missions of the Carter Center, which is housed and based in Atlanta to this day.

They have worked in, I think, 60 countries around the world, at least, promoting health in some of the poorest parts of the planet, the poorest people on Earth.

Those were the people who Jimmy Carter said he wanted to pay attention to.

But it was also working to find peace in regions of the world that the bigger countries often overlooked.

For him, that was a huge part of what he wanted to do as his legacy.

And, yes, he did win the Nobel Peace Prize.

He was incredibly, incredibly proud of that.

But I have to say one other thing that was so important to him, and that was his own faith.

He was a man of Christian faith.

When I interviewed him in 2021, Nick, he spoke about how he and Rosalynn read the verses from the Bible every night and prayed.

This was a central piece of who he was.

And he said, as long as the American people keep faith, he said, we will continue to have a strong country.

So it was something that I will always, that all of us will identify with him.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Jim Fallows, Kai Bird, Judy Woodruff, thank you very much.

KAI BIRD: Thank you.

JAMES FALLOWS: Thank you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Thank you.

NICK SCHIFRIN: The day's other news begins in South Korea, where the acting president today ordered an inspection of the nation's entire aviation sector after yesterday's crash south of Seoul that killed 179 people.

Only two survived when the Jeju Airlines Boeing 737-800 skidded off the runway and exploded, both of them crew members.

Here's Stephanie Sy.

STEPHANIE SY: An anguished man cries out among a sea of forlorn faces.

Families of the victims of one of the deadliest air disasters in South Korean history want answers.

PARK HAN SHIN, Family Member of Victim (through translator): What we have to demand from the government is to bring in more experts.

We have wanted the government to recover our families 100 percent, or at least 80 percent, as soon as possible.

STEPHANIE SY: Park Han Shin's brother was one of 181 people on board Jeju Air Flight 7C-2216.

It was flying from Bangkok and belly-landed in Muan.

Without its landing gear deployed, the plane overshot the runway, barreling at high speed straight into a concrete wall.

Nearly everyone on board died as the plane burst into flames.

Only two crew members survived.

They were pulled out from the tail of the aircraft.

PARK HAN SHIN (through translator): The bodies are so severely damaged that we're in a situation where we need to recover and piece them together one by one.

That's the current reality.

STEPHANIE SY: In the packed airport, Jeju Air executive Lee Jung-Suk bowed in remorse.

LEE JUNG-SUK, Chief Finance Officer, Jeju Air (through translator): We will take full responsibility and accept any necessary measures.

Once again, I offer my deepest apologies.

STEPHANIE SY: Today, investigators are sifting through the wreckage for evidence.

The black box has been recovered.

It could reveal what transpired leading up to the tragic landing, but that data won't yield immediate answers.

What is known is that Korean air traffic controllers had warned the pilots of the possibility of a bird strike just before landing.

Some experts say that alone is unlikely to be the cause of such a major crash and other factors bear scrutiny.

DAVID LEARMOUNT, Aviation Expert: I'm pretty shocked, actually, because whatever happened to the airplane which meant that the pilot couldn't get the flaps and gear down for the landing was not actually what caused the death of the passengers.

The passengers were killed by hitting a solid structure just over the end of the runway, where a solid structure should not be.

STEPHANIE SY: The ill-fated plane was a Boeing 737-800 used by 180 airlines around the world, making up about 15 percent of the global passenger aircraft fleet.

The government ordered an inspection of every Boeing 737-800 operating in the country.

Boeing said it's in touch with Jeju Air for the investigation.

The grim tragedy struck at a time when the country is dealing with political upheaval at the highest level.

This month, President Yoon Suk Yeol was impeached after imposing a short-lived martial law decree that angered the nation.

The acting president, Choi Sang-mok, has announced a weeklong period of mourning.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Stephanie Sy.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Also today, President Biden announced another $2.5 billion in U.S. military aid to Ukraine, the latest step to help Ukraine's war effort before president-elect Trump takes office next month.

The package includes $1.25 billion in missiles, munitions and other hardware that the U.S. says can be moved to the battlefield quickly.

The rest comes in the form of weapons delivered longer term.

Separately, the Treasury Department announced $3.4 billion in economic assistance to Ukraine.

The military assistance comes as some 300 Ukrainian and Russian captives were freed in the latest prisoner swap.

Some Ukrainian troops had been held since the early days of the war.

Today, they reunited with loved ones.

VASYL NESHCHERET, Ukrainian Border Guard (through translator): I'm serving and will continue to serve our country, Ukraine.

The most important thing is that I am on my land.

I saw my country's flag and my family.

This is just the best.

It's just amazing, after everything that happened to us in Russia, after what they did to us.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked the United Arab Emirates for helping to negotiate the exchange.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban leadership says it will close all nongovernmental organizations, both national and international, that employ Afghan women.

The Taliban didn't say exactly why, but have for the last two years warned that NGOs have to stop employing women because of concerns they weren't wearing headscarves properly.

In a letter published on social media, the economy ministry warned that, if groups did not cooperate -- quote -- "All activities of that institution will be canceled.

Since retaking control of Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban have barred women from most jobs, from public spaces, and from education after middle school.

A federal appeals court upheld a $5 million verdict against president-elect Trump for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.

The magazine columnist had claimed Trump assaulted her in a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s.

The three-judge panel found that Trump did not sufficiently make the case that the May 2023 verdict should be thrown out.

In a separate case, a jury ordered Trump to pay her more than $83 million in damages for defamation related to the assault accusation.

Trump denies any wrongdoing and is still appealing that verdict.

The U.S. Treasury Department revealed today that Chinese state hackers stole documents earlier this month in what it called a major incident.

A Treasury spokesperson said the hackers - - quote -- "were able to remotely access several Treasury user workstations and certain unclassified documents."

In a letter to lawmakers seen by the "News Hour," the department added there is no evidence of continued access to Treasury information.

This comes in the wake of a massive Chinese hacking campaign against at least nine American telecom companies which U.S. officials admit is still ongoing.

China has previously denied any wrongdoing.

On Wall Street today, stocks ended lower as traders prepare to close the books on an otherwise strong 2024.

The Dow Jones industrial average dropped more than 400 points, or nearly 1 percent.

The Nasdaq fell more than 200 points on the day.

The S&P 500 also ended in negative territory.

And a passing of note., Broadway actress turned sitcom star Linda Lavin has died.

In the 1970s and '80s, Lavin played the title character in "Alice," delivering a weekly serving of laughs as a diner waitress raising a young son.

LINDA LAVIN, Actress: Where did you get that?

ACTOR: From Roger.

I traded my electric guitar for it.

LINDA LAVIN: You what?

ACTRESS: He traded his electric guitar.

LINDA LAVIN: I heard him!

NICK SCHIFRIN: The sitcom aired on CBS for nearly a decade, becoming a prime-time hit and earning Lavin two Golden Globes.

Following "Alice," she returned to the stage, where in 1987 she won a Tony Award for her performance in Neil Simon's "Broadway Bound."

Lavin's representative says she died yesterday from complications related to lung cancer.

She was 87 years old.

Still to come on the "News Hour": Tamara Keith and Amy Walter break down the latest political headlines; and literary critics offer their choices for the best and most important books of 2024.

There is new data out that show the number of murders in this country is declining rapidly.

Crime was, of course, a central focus of the presidential election, with president-elect Trump portraying crime as out of control, and a majority of Americans believe that crime is increasing.

William Brangham is here with a look at what the numbers tell us -- William.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Nick, data collected from hundreds of law enforcement agencies show the murder rate dropped 16 percent compared to last year.

In San Francisco, homicides have fallen by a third.

Chicago recorded its lowest number of murders since 2019.

And rates of other crimes also fell.

Car thefts declined by roughly 20 percent.

For a closer look at what this means, we are joined by crime data analyst Jeff Asher.

He's the co-founder of AH Datalytics and creator of the Real-Time Crime Index.

Jeff Asher, so good to have you on the program.

When you look at all of this data that you analyzed, what stood out to you the most?

JEFF ASHER, Crime Analyst: I think the scope of the decline in murder stands out, certainly.

Right now, we have over 300 cities' worth of data through October showing murder down 16 percent.

Last year, the FBI had murdered down 12 percent.

For some context, the largest one-year decline ever recorded prior to last year was a 9 percent decline in 1996.

So it's not just that we're seeing a decline in murder.

It's not just that we're seeing murder relatively returning to where it was pre-pandemic, but we're seeing by far the fastest one-year declines last year and then again this year.

And it's been a phenomenal trend to be able to follow.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: What is your understanding as to what is the most plausible explanation for what is driving this decline?

JEFF ASHER: I think the most plausible explanation is a combination of, one, just sort of everyday life getting back to normal, the stresses specific to the pandemic going away, and, two, a lot of the tools that we would ordinarily use, both policing and non-policing, to interrupt these cycles of violence which sort of erupted in the summer of 2020, we didn't have those tools in 2020 and 2021 and even much of 2022.

Now we have those tools at our disposal.

And in a lot of cities, we're seeing murder and gun violence return to and even exceed where it was pre-pandemic.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: We're seeing also, as I mentioned, declines in other types of crimes, but overall crime declines, they were not universal.

There are some places that saw either a plateauing or an uptick.

Isn't that right?

JEFF ASHER: Sure.

I think we're looking at places like Charlotte, North Carolina, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that had increasing murders, but for the most part those are the outliers, and they're notable because they're the outliers.

I believe, in the latest Real-Time Crime Index, we had 40 cities that had seen a double-digit decline in murders and only five cities that had seen a double-digit increase.

There's other types of crime that are maybe not seen as significant declines in terms of robbery and aggravated assault.

We're seeing significant declines in burglary, theft and a huge decline in motor vehicle theft after four years of increases.

So, yes, you can always point to things that maybe are either around even or even increasing in various cities, but with the majority of cities, the pattern tends to be decreases across the board.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Your analysis and all of the work that you do is clearly built on giving the average citizen a better window into what crime really does look like, both nationally and in their own city.

But, as you know, the perception of crime, people believe the opposite of what your data indicate.

How do you explain that?

JEFF ASHER: I think there's lots of little things that add up.

The first is that there's a data vacuum.

We don't have a lot of good, strong data, and that's the vacuum that we're hoping that projects like the Real-Time Crime Index can fill.

The FBI doesn't put out its year-end numbers until nine months after the most recent year ended.

So, one, you're asking people to essentially not use data and use anecdotes, and they're always going to have a bias towards how many murders have I seen on the news recently, rather than how many murders did I see last year at this time.

I think other challenges of the media doesn't cover the planes that land, there's rarely stories and I have done far fewer of these interviews where you're talking about declines in murder, even though it's a record decline, than were being done in 2020 and 2021, when we were seeing big increases in murder, big increases in gun violence.

And then you talked about at the beginning partisanship is playing a role; 90 percent of Republicans, 28 percent of Democrats and 60-something percent of independents think that crime rose over the last year.

And we're not seeing necessarily enormous just crime disappearing from American society.

So you would expect to see maybe 40, maybe 50 percent of the public thinking crime rose.

That you have this enormous gap between how Democrats and Republicans see perceptions suggest that they're being fed very different stories about what's actually happening in terms of crime in the country.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: What is your sense as far as the practical impact of people not understanding reality with regards to crime?

I mean, what differences it make?

JEFF ASHER: Well, I think it has enormous differences in terms of, one, it's not healthy for people to be afraid.

It's not healthy for people to think that they're going to get mugged every day or that they live in some crime-ridden dumpster that nobody would want to live in, when reality is things may be in their city getting a lot better.

I think the other real challenge is that, if we create a world where either crime is rising or the data is wrong, then we're never able to understand, why are things getting better?

Is it something we're doing?

Is it randomness?

Is it a policy that nobody's thinking of that's having an effect that we didn't expect?

How can we understand successes is just as important as how can we identify and reverse failures, because, if we're having successful reduction policies, it's really a shame on us if we let this moment pass without seeing why these are happening and what we can do to extend it and what we can do to make this happen in places that are not currently seeing declines.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: All right, Jeff Asher of the Real-Time Crime Index, thank you so much for your time.

JEFF ASHER: Thanks for having me.

NICK SCHIFRIN: As 2025 is about to begin, we look ahead at the political landscape to come and back at the year that was with our Politics Monday team, Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter, and Tamara Keith of NPR.

Thanks very much.

Welcome to you both.

Tam, let me start with you.

Jimmy Carter had 40 years to define his legacy after the White House.

Not only does Biden not have that much time, but is there a recognition that in fact Biden's successor could help define Biden's legacy?

TAMARA KEITH, National Public Radio: Absolutely.

President Carter really gave himself a new legacy, a second legacy; 40 years is an incredibly longtime.

President Biden does not have 40 years.

The actuarial tables tell us that's basically impossible.

And so his presidency is likely to be defined both by what he did in office, but increasingly by how his time in office came to an end.

He ran in 2019 for president to make Donald Trump a one-term president.

That was why he ran.

That is what he said.

And now Donald Trump will be a two-term president.

History remembers two-term presidents generally more fondly than they remember one-term presidents.

And I have spoken to several presidential historians who say that President Biden, much of his -- the fate of his legacy may well be defined by how people ultimately perceive Donald Trump.

But, right now, if you ask, he was the dragon slayer, as one historian told me, but then he also is the man who let the dragon back in.

That at least is the perception from this historian I spoke to.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Amy Walter, is Biden uniquely perhaps vulnerable to have a legacy written by his successor?

AMY WALTER, The Cook Political Report: Well, certainly, in this most recent era, where we have had some pretty young presidents, we also have Bill Clinton, who left office in his 50s, much like Jimmy Carter did, who's been able to watch his own legacy be written and rewritten almost every few years, George W. Bush also leaving office at a relatively young age, and, of course, Barack Obama.

So this is unique in our recent era, but we have certainly had presidents who, soon after they left office, maybe they were defined by -- I'm thinking of Lyndon Baines Johnson -- things about their presidency that were the most unpopular, and then years and years and years later, their legacy is redefined by some of the other accomplishments they had.

I think what's also fascinating in looking at Biden and Carter in the same lens for a second, both of them were felled by a similar issue, which is inflation, both of them as one-term presidents.

But if you look back and you look at what happened with Jimmy Carter, both when he came into office and after he left, he was really an outsider and really enjoyed and embraced that outsiderness, going back to Plains, Georgia, of course, right after he left the White House.

Biden will be remembered for being the consummate insider whose life was defined by Washington.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Congress returns at the end of the week.

And the first item on the agenda is choosing the House speaker.

President-elect Trump today, through his support behind the incumbent, Mike Johnson, writing this message on a social media platform -- quote - - "He is a good, hardworking, religious man.

He will do the right thing and we will continue to win.

Mike has my complete and total endorsement."

With such a narrow margin in the House, Tam, does this get Johnson over the top?

TAMARA KEITH: Well, it's not clear yet.

We do know of at least one House member who has said -- House Republican who has said he will not support Johnson.

We also know that House Democrats are not planning to bail him out.

Johnson faced another challenge to his speakership and Democrats at that point did step in and support him.

This time, they feel burned by the deal at the end of the year, at the end of -- right before the holidays to keep the government funded.

It was supposed to do a bunch of other things.

It was a bipartisan deal.

It blew up in part because of Trump and Musk, but Democrats left that saying, well, we can't trust Johnson.

So, he won't have Democrats to help.

Trump -- this is going to be a test of Trump's sway with his party, with Republicans, because Trump also said that he wanted the debt limit to be extended and he wanted that done and the decks cleared before he came into office, and 38 House Republicans voted against that.

So this will be a test.

We will see.

But Trump has every reason to not want a leadership battle right now, because he wants to hit the ground running, and a leadership battle will distract and make it harder for Republicans to have the kind of unity they are going to have to have with that narrow majority in order to get the things done that he wants done.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Amy Walter, can Trump avoid a leadership battle?

AMY WALTER: Yes, Tam said it perfectly there at the end.

He can't really afford for this to go off the rails.

Look, I think this is going to be a constant in this Trump second term, is this push and pull between Trump wanting to be the disrupter.

That is something that he enjoys.

It's something he campaigned on.

It's something we saw in his first term.

And, as Tam pointed out, this is also what we saw at the end of the year, disrupting at the very end of the process this deal on the funding for the government and potentially a debt ceiling raise.

He also, though, the pull side -- if we do -- that was the push, the pull side is wanting to accomplish something now that he has coming into office very narrow, but still a Republican majority in the House and in the Senate.

Does he want to be a disrupter?

Does he want to be a doer?

He can't get a whole lot done in his first two years if what is happening is constant friction and constant disruption, intraparty friction and disruption that he may help to stoke.

So, in this case, he's seeing the importance of lining up behind a speaker, preventing that disruption in this area.

But I don't think that this means that we're not going to see the disruptive side sometimes overruling the doer side.

NICK SCHIFRIN: We have got about a minute-and-a-half left, so you each have 45 seconds.

Amy, you first.

Sorry, Tam, you first.

We're wrapping up 2024, biggest political highlight of the year.

TAMARA KEITH: Highlight.

Well, I'm going to go with some surprises.

And there were many of them.

This was a year of political surprises.

I think the ultimate surprise in the election result was that, after two elections where Donald Trump never broke 47 percent, where he was pretty much stuck at 47 percent, he broke 47 percent.

He exceeded what was thought to be his ceiling with an effective campaign and obviously the help of inflation and a desire for change among American voters.

Obviously, the other huge surprise was President Biden's performance in that debate, just a devastating performance that people were trying to say, well, maybe he could do OK, maybe it won't be the best, but he will be OK. No one was predicting that it would be that bad and that it would have those sorts of consequences, though, actually, I will say, lots of voters were predicting that somehow Joe Biden would get out of the race well before that happened.

Those voters were right.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Amy, political highlight of the year, in about 25 seconds?

AMY WALTER: Yes.

I think it was that the Republican success was decisive, but also continues to be very, very narrow.

Look, control of the House came down to at the end of the day about 7,000 votes split across the three most competitive races.

Push those the other way, Democrats have control of the House.

In the presidential race, Trump won a decisive victory, won the popular vote, but it was really thanks to about 229,000 voters in those blue wall states that gave him the electoral victory out of... NICK SCHIFRIN: Out of 155 million.

AMY WALTER: That's right.

So, that is very narrow.

And I think this is the reality that we have to continue to remind ourselves, that we live in an era of politics that is fought here on the margins, and the smallest margins seem to be the most important.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Amy Walter, Tamara Keith, thanks very much to you both.

TAMARA KEITH: You're welcome.

NICK SCHIFRIN: This holiday shopping season, Americans were projected to spend 7 percent more than last year.

But our Paul Solman was alerted to a social media trend that in a world of consumerism hits pause before pressing the purchase button.

WOMAN: Get ready with me to go on a shopping spree.

PAUL SOLMAN: The perennial end-of-year messages we have just had to endure in print, on TV, and all over social media, buy away, buy away, buy away all.

WOMAN: Let's do the biggest shopping haul ever.

WOMAN: We're going to go self-care shopping at Sephora, Ulta, Target.

WOMAN: This is everything that I got.

Let's go through it quickly.

PAUL SOLMAN: But here's what's also been trending this year, #Underconsumptioncore.

DIANA WIEBE, De-Influencer: I wanted to show you stuff that I have had for literal decades.

My CHI hair straightener from 2010, 2011, somewhere in there, still works great.

PAUL SOLMAN: Countertrender Diana Wiebe was posting videos like this one.

DIANA WIEBE: You can see I have hit pan on a couple of these, couple of my faves, but it's still good.

It's rejecting what influencers and the companies behind them are trying to get you to do, which is buy more and buy it right now.

PAUL SOLMAN: It's a younger generation's reaction to America's throwaway culture, buy less, repurpose, shop vintage, instead of plunging reflexively for: DIANA WIEBE: I'm just going to be the first one to say it, I guess, garbage.

PAUL SOLMAN: Of course, Wiebe is hardly the first to say it or the first to push underconsumption.

BRETT HOUSE, Columbia Business School: I don't think it's new at all.

It's what we have called in the past living within our means.

PAUL SOLMAN: Brett House, economics professor at Columbia University's Business School.

BRETT HOUSE: I think it's worth noting that, if there's underconsumption happening anywhere, it's almost certainly for people at lower incomes who are facing greater challenges in covering their day-to-day needs.

If we look at past cycles between booms and recessions, in the wake of any slowdown, we have seen people focus more on cleaning up their debt, reducing consumption and aligning expenses with their incomes.

PAUL SOLMAN: Same for garbage products made to expire.

BRETT HOUSE: We have seen products with defined life cycles hit the market for decades.

PAUL SOLMAN: Built-in obsolescence, it's called, a term coined nearly a century ago.

But, hey, how better to keep the hamster wheel of consumerism spinning?

Problem is, says Wiebe, it's getting worse.

DIANA WIEBE: I have seen a decline in quality just over my lifetime.

I'm only 30 years old, but I can see when things are not made as well as they once were.

PAUL SOLMAN: And online shopping has never been easier, one click, payment info already saved for products increasingly pushed by influencers posing as your friends.

WOMAN: TikTok just me a notification that the Juvia's Place blushes is $9?

Go get it right now, bestie.

MELISSA BUBLITZ, University of Wisconsin-Madison: They see people having the newest water bottles, the newest fashion, the newest shoes or handbags, and they want those things.

PAUL SOLMAN: Consumer researcher Melissa Bublitz.

MELISSA BUBLITZ: This idea of advertising is not new, but I think what is new is the amount of time and the wide variety of exposure that our young people have to this influencer culture.

PAUL SOLMAN: Look, way back in 1960, "The Waste Makers" urged resistance to built-in obsolescence in the spirit of sustainability.

Two years later, Dr. Seuss rhymed about the exhausted Zizzer-Zoof salesman.

"All day they have raced round in the heat at top speeds, unsuccessfully trying to sell Zizzer-Zoof seeds, which nobody wants because nobody needs."

AJA BARBER, Writer: We, as consumers, in more privileged countries buy five times more clothing today than we bought in 1990, which means that something has changed in our buying habits as well.

PAUL SOLMAN: That beautiful sweater you're wearing, how long have you had that?

AJA BARBER: Eight, going on nine years maybe.

PAUL SOLMAN: Aja Barber is the author of "Consumed," a critique of what we buy and how it's created.

AJA BARBER: I have always shopped secondhand.

It just wasn't very cool.

I remember getting clothing from eBay in the early 2000s when I was a university student and keeping that a bit of a secret from some of my peers, who would think it was icky.

So it's always been the way some of us have done it.

It's just now become a part of a larger conversation a planet that is in duress.

PAUL SOLMAN: As it turns out, 92 million tons of clothing end up in landfills every year.

And, every year, automation will make products, this shirt, say, cheaper, not to mention overproduction that's already peddled at absurdly low prices by Chinese e-commerce companies like Temu and AliExpress, all of which leading to more waste.

AJA BARBER: Looking at all of the clothing that was being pushed on myself and others, I began to wonder where this clothing was going.

I soon learned that there are places in the Global South that end up with mountains of our clothing, and it is not something that is needed or wanted.

DIANA WIEBE: I do see just in my own interactions with people who I'm talking to that they want to consume less, they want to be more mindful of when they're being advertised to.

PAUL SOLMAN: Diana Wiebe's following has swelled from 1,000 to more than 200,000, the meme prompting more than 20,000 posts on TikTok alone.

But here's the rub.

It hasn't made much of an impact on overall consumer spending, says researcher Bublitz.

MELISSA BUBLITZ: We don't see consumption going down.

In fact, our population is growing by less than 1 percent, but our consumer spending is growing at least 5 percent.

BRETT HOUSE: If anything, we have seen slightly higher-than-normal consumption, not underconsumption, in the big numbers we look at.

DIANA WIEBE: But it's still a perfectly good mug.

PAUL SOLMAN: So is the meme all for naught?

No, insists de-influencer Wiebe.

DIANA WIEBE: So, my hope is that people don't necessarily treat it as -- underconsumption core as a trend, but rather just, like, my normal lifestyle is not buying things instantaneously or in great quantities.

PAUL SOLMAN: For the "PBS News Hour," Paul Solman, a bit bummed to have overconsumed yet again this year while doing this very story.

NICK SCHIFRIN: And finally tonight, 'tis the season for year-end lists.

And our Jeffrey Brown sat down with two of our regular literary critics to highlight their favorite books of 2024 for our arts and culture coverage, Canvas.

JEFFREY BROWN: It's been another year of great releases across a number of genres.

And to help us recap the highlights we're joined now by two familiar faces, Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR's "Fresh Air," and Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review.

Nice to see both of you at this time of year.

Let's start with my own favorite.

Because I get to choose, that's fiction.

So, Gilbert, you want to start us off with a couple of fiction picks?

GILBERT CRUZ, Books Editor, The New York Times: Absolutely.

It's good to see you both.

The first book I want to talk about is a book some of you may have heard of.

It's called "All Fours" by Miranda July, certainly was a big book this summer.

It is -- it's kind of a wacky premise.

You have a middle-aged female artist who decides to take a road trip from L.A. to New York; 20 minutes outside of town, she stops at a motel, decides to completely redo the motel, becomes obsessed with a younger man, and the story takes off from there.

It's a crazy start, but in the end it's a very serious book about what it means to be middle-aged, particularly a middle-aged woman, what it means to be a parent and a mother, what it means to be -- to have desire and be desired as you approach middle-aged.

And while humor is very subjective, I found it very funny.

It was quite an entertaining read.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, how about one more?

GILBERT CRUZ: Sure.

I love books in translation.

There was one that came out earlier this year called "You Dreamed of Empires."

This is by Alvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer.

And it takes place in what is now Mexico City, it was then called Tenochtitlan, in 1519.

Hernan Cortes just rolled into town with all of his soldiers, and he meets the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma.

You have these two cultures coming together.

There's this threat of violence that hangs over the whole thing, but there's also this comedy of manners elements to the entire book.

For Cortes and his people, they're wondering, are we speaking the right language with our translators?

Are they going to kill us?

For the Aztecs, they're looking at these horses.

They have never seen them before.

It's a sort of a fascinating melange of different tones that Enrigue puts together.

Incredible book.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Maureen, so he went with very contemporary and historical fiction back to Cortes.

What have you got?

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPR Book Critic: Well, I have got, in a sense, historical fiction and very contemporary too, "James" by Percival Everett, which I think has landed on so many best-of lists this year.

JEFFREY BROWN: National Book Award winner.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Yes, I mean -- thank you.

And it's a retelling in a sense of "Huckleberry Finn," but from the point of view of Jim, James, the enslaved person in the novel.

I usually am suspicious of these kinds of appropriations of classic texts and through the point of view of a secondary character.

JEFFREY BROWN: Retelling, yes.

Yes.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: This is alive.

It is very much its own novel.

It's funny.

It's heartfelt.

The opening scene is James educating young children in the community how to speak through a slave filter, so that white people will listen to them.

And it really makes you rethink "Huckleberry Finn" in ways you can't even anticipate.

So that's one.

JEFFREY BROWN: OK. MAUREEN CORRIGAN: And then this is a peculiar year, right?

Danzy Senna's "Colored Television."

Danzy Senna happens to be married to Percival Everett.

So, I would love to be... JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

You're showing a lot of love to this household.

(CROSSTALK) (LAUGHTER) MAUREEN CORRIGAN: I would to hear their dinner table conversations.

Really sharp social commentary, funny, satirical.

It's about a woman who -- mixed race who is trying to write this epic novel about what it means to be mixed race in America.

And she's not getting any -- having any success with the novel.

So she decides to sell out.

She lives in L.A. She goes to TV.

Such a smart novel about the writing life and also about class, as well as race, I mean, what it means to have a lot of cultural capital without a lot of financial capital, which is the plight of a lot of writers.

JEFFREY BROWN: And "News Hour" viewers know we had both of them on this show.

Gilbert Cruz, what about nonfiction?

GILBERT CRUZ: So, "The Wide Wide Sea" by Hampton Sides is about the third and final voyage of Captain James Cook, Captain Cook, very, very well-known British explorer.

This is the journey that he took from England in 1776 to the South Pacific in part to return a Tahitian man or a man from those islands to his own island, but also to try to find the Northwest Passage, which, as you both know, was a thing that people really tried to do back then.

And it's one of those classic pieces of historical nonfiction that anyone who loves seafaring adventure will enjoy, but it also has that very sort of necessary realization of what it means to have engaged in these sort of imperialist endeavors back then.

And so it has a modern understanding of history while also being incredibly detail-oriented and incredibly entertaining.

So, that's one.

And the other one I will talk about is very contemporary.

It is "Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here" by Jonathan Blitzer.

We just came out of a presidential election in which the immigration situation at the southern border was one of the key sort of points of debate.

And what Blitzer, who is a staff writer at "The New Yorker," has done is put together a history of a half-century of the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.

It focuses on three nations, three Central American nations, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

And through administrations, Republican and Democrat, it sort of tells the story of how we have gotten to the point where we are today.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Maureen Corrigan, two nonfiction?

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Yes, "A Wilder Shore" by Camille Peri.

It tells the story of the marriage of Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Stevenson.

And she is the star of the show in this telling.

JEFFREY BROWN: It's her story, yes.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: It's her story, as it should be.

I mean, she was a woman who really fled from an abusive marriage, went to Europe on no money, decided she wanted to be an artist, taking her three children with her, met Stevenson, and we go on from there.

But it is an inspiring story about having a larger life.

So that's one.

The other suggestion is the new edition of "The Letters of Emily Dickinson," which Harvard's Belknap Press has brought out.

JEFFREY BROWN: "The Letters of Emily Dickinson."

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Yes, 300 new letters have been collected that we haven't seen before.

JEFFREY BROWN: Wow.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: It's the closest thing we're ever likely to get to an autobiography by Dickinson.

And I tell you, you can't put it down.

(LAUGHTER) JEFFREY BROWN: Wow.

I wasn't expecting that.

OK, so I want to give you each in the time we have left a bonus pick, OK?

So,whatever -- maybe a book that just didn't get as much attention as you hoped, but that you tell your close friends, you got to read this.

Gilbert Cruz, you want to pick one?

GILBERT CRUZ: Absolutely.

So a book that came out sort of late in the year that I really enjoyed is called "Karla's Choice."

It's by Nick Harkaway.

And it's a new John le Carre story.

So, John le Carre died in 2020.

His son, Nick Harkaway, is also a writer.

He's a novelist known primarily for science fiction work.

And he has written a new story starring George Smiley, so George Smiley, one of the most famous spy protagonists of all time, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and all of those books.

This is set in the period between "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy."

And he does just a remarkable job of not really mimicking his father's voice as much as inhabiting it.

And he tells a story of George Smiley and his nemesis on the Soviet side, Karla.

It was quite entertaining.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Maureen, a final bonus pick.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: OK, this is out of the box for me.

JEFFREY BROWN: Out of the box.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: "The Dog Who Followed the Moon" by James Norbury.

It's an illustrated, inspirational book for adults.

And it's really all about a dog who's lost and follows the moon and doesn't know where he's going to end up.

For those of us who are feeling a little lost these days and unsure about what paths to take, the illustrations are gorgeous.

And, again, I guess inspiring is my theme for my picks this year.

I found it very inspiring.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, great picks, as always.

Maureen Corrigan, Gilbert Cruz, thank you both very much, and happy new year.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Happy new year.

GILBERT CRUZ: Thank you.

NICK SCHIFRIN: Later this evening on PBS, "American Experience" presents an encore broadcast of its documentary "Jimmy Carter."

The film traces his life as president from a rapid ascent to a dramatic downfall, and it chronicles his many achievements in the decades following his presidency as statesman and humanitarian.

"Jimmy Carter" airs tonight at 8:00 p.m. Eastern on PBS.

Check your local listings.

And, as always, we have much more online.

That includes 2024 song recommendations from some of the music industry's most decorated artists and producers.

And that is on our Instagram.

And that's the "News Hour" for tonight.

I'm Nick Schifrin.

I hope you had a good day.

On behalf of the entire "News Hour" team, thank you for joining us.

Have a great night.