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LYNCHBURG, Va. — Jimmy Carter thinks Donald Trump would be worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize if the North Korean negotiations work out.

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He says this, even though he believes Trump has already dealt “a damaging blow to peace” in the Middle East by moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and has failed to deliver moral leadership in a way that has increased discrimination and diminished human rights, both at home and around the world.

The former president, who has spent the 37 years since he left office promoting humanitarian causes and monitoring free elections around the world, worries about what’s ahead.

“There’s a general feeling, on a global basis, that democracy has reached its peak and is declining,” Carter told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, when asked about those who see Trump’s presidency as a challenge to democratic ideals. “I hope that that trend will reverse.”

Carter said he’d let others judge whether the current occupant of the Oval Office is a moral leader. But he left no doubt about where he thinks Trump is falling short.

“I think the president ought to tell the truth. I think the president ought to be for peace. I think the president ought to treat everybody equally. So, equality and peace and the truth, and I’d say basic justice are some of the moral values that I think every person should have,” Carter said.

When a president fails to embody the ideals of a moral leader, Carter said, “it makes us much more likely to treat people differently, and to discriminate against either African-Americans or others who are different. … I think it’s probably more difficult to elevate human rights to a top priority, and things like peace and justice.”

Sharper and in better physical shape than most people at 93—especially most people who’ve been through a brain tumor in the past two years—Carter says he doesn’t want to take on Trump.

But that doesn’t mean he won’t.

“We told the truth, we obeyed the law and we kept the peace,” Vice President Walter Mondale famously said of the Carter administration. On that scorecard, Carter said the current administration’s performance is, “Well, so far we’ve remained at peace.”

“I’m not here to criticize, but I think that, you know, telling the truth is one of the basic moral values that’s important,” Carter said. “And obeying the law is an oath that all of us take before we assume public office.”

Carter spent Saturday in a place everyone involved admitted they never would have expected: as the keynote speaker at the commencement ceremonies for Liberty University, the evangelical Christian, heavily Republican school founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell and now run by Jerry Falwell Jr. and his family. Last year, the university’s commencement speaker was President Trump—which Carter pointed out in an opening joke, noting that he’d been told the crowd was even bigger than last year’s.

“I don’t know if President Trump will admit that or not,” Carter said.

That got polite laughter, but not the hoot it might have in front of a different crowd.

For years, comparisons to Jimmy Carter have been used as an epithet in politics. “Even Jimmy Carter” would have given the order for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Mitt Romney said in 2012, trying to undercut Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement. Carter has been such a punching bag that there’s a classic episode of “The Simpsons” where the residents of Springfield can’t afford an Abraham Lincoln statue, so they get a Carter one instead.

“Well, I don’t like to be compared unfavorably by anybody, of course,” Carter said. “I’m a human being. But I’m accustomed to it. I know that in politics, you have to be willing to roll with the punches and to take the bad ones and enjoy the good ones.”

Click here to subscribe and hear the full podcast, including what Carter has learned about living through negotiations in real time and how he thinks Democrats will so in future elections.

In his remarks introducing Carter on Saturday, Falwell Jr. invoked a comparison between Carter and Trump—and meant it as a compliment to both. Falwell was one of the earliest prominent conservative leaders to endorse Trump’s presidential campaign, and has remained among his most eager defenders, despite the stories about porn star payoffs and other indiscretions that would seem to put evangelicals in an uncomfortable spot. Falwell said he’s thought about how both Carter and Trump came in as outsiders fighting an elite establishment—the same entrenched elites Jesus Christ opposed. Both Carter and Trump shook up Washington, he said. And, he added, he hopes there will be more presidents like the two of them.

Looking out at the Liberty University football field, with a new upper deck to prepare for its move into the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision next season, Falwell thought back to when he heard Carter speak at the opening of the Billy Graham Library in 2007, which also featured remarks by Bill Clinton and both Presidents Bush. Falwell recalled that he turned to his wife and said, “of all the four former presidents speaking, [Carter] sounded more like one of us than the rest.”

And Falwell said that when Carter has come up in conversations with Trump over the phone, the president has been thankful for Carter’s friendship, though it’s not clear what that friendship consists of—other than Carter being the first former president to agree to attend Trump’s inauguration, and doing an interview with Maureen Dowd last year in which he said he thought the media were being unfair to Trump.

Carter, who still teaches Sunday school classes at his church in Plains, Georgia, also knocked the media for seeding the impression that evangelicals are naturally Republicans, though polls show that up to 80 percent voted for Trump in 2016.

“The news media has anointed the more conservative Christians as evangelicals. I consider myself an evangelical as well,” Carter said. “So I think that’s kind of an artificial delineation that has arisen.”

He warned against conflating Christians with Republicans. He reads the same Bible—in fact, he and his wife have been reading passages to each other every night for more than 40 years—and draws on many of the same intense beliefs, but he said he’s not the only Christian to come away from the Bible with a different approach to social welfare programs, immigration and other issues.

“About 1,900 churches are more moderate Baptists, and we’re just as evangelical as the more conservative churches. We send missionaries overseas. We try to minister, like myself through my Bible teaching and that sort of thing. So I wouldn’t draw that distinction, except as a choice that everybody makes—every American makes. Christians are not about whether they vote Democratic or Republican,” Carter said.

Last year, Carter said he’d be eager to be Trump’s envoy to North Korea, where he’s spent time and tried to work on a solution to the country’s ongoing isolation and festering nuclear crisis. That was in the months after Trump said that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “best not make any more threats to the United States” or risk “fire and the fury like the world has never seen.”

Carter never got the posting, but he still offered his unsolicited advice to Trump for the summit that’s still supposed happen in Singapore on June 12.

“We’ve done everything we could to destroy the economy of North Korea, and every North Korean knows that. And we’ve done everything, at the same time, that we could to help South Korea have a good, successful economy,” Carter said. “The North Korean people ought to be treated with respect, and I think that the embargo that we’ve enforced on them has basically hurt the people who are already suffering under a brutal dictatorship, and has not hurt the leaders of North Korea very much.”

He said the Pyongyang leadership’s erratic behavior, including threats to cancel the summit, is to be expected.

“If they’re under constant belief that the United States wants to attack them, even using nuclear weapons—which many Democrats and Republican leaders in our country have mentioned as a possibility—and that we are destroying their economy, and they know that they’re starving to death primarily because the United States withholds food aid, for instance, just giving them surplus food that we can’t ever use, then I can understand how they feel.”

He added, “I think that the next mediator, next negotiator—maybe President Trump, I hope—will reassure them that we’re willing to give up some of those things—the threat of attack on them and to lift the embargo. That would be a cheap price, in my opinion, to pay for a cessation of their nuclear program.”

And if it works out, Carter said he’d be happy to have Trump join him in the ranks of Nobel laureates.

“If President Trump is successful in getting a peace treaty that’s acceptable to both sides with North Korea, I think he certainly ought to be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize,” Carter said. “I think it would be a worthy and a momentous accomplishment that no previous president has been able to realize.”

On stage at Liberty an hour after our interview, Carter sat next to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, the event’s other main honoree. Though he’s 30 years younger than the former president, Carson spoke for about a tenth of the time, mostly about his strong Christian beliefs, and a little on how that influenced his time in government—“a chance to focus on people, not programs.”

The weather was cool and raining—most people wore plastic ponchos—but Falwell spoke at length about his own family and Liberty’s story before turning to introducing the former president. He talked about the “courage of conviction” it took for Carter to sign the Hyde Act, which banned federal money from funding abortion.

And he talked about how much it meant to see Carter on the morning before Trump’s inauguration, the only former president who attended the prayer service at St. John’s Episcopal, across Lafayette Park from the White House. Falwell said it was the moment that started him down the path of inviting Carter to Liberty.

“I am proud that Christians are uniting here on issues where they agree, rather than where they disagree,” Falwell said.

Carter’s speech was heavily rooted in Christianity, built around a line from an old teacher—“we must accommodate to changing times, but cling to unchanging principles.”

After his opening joke about crowd size, Carter never again mentioned Trump’s name. But he made clear that, even as he said he hoped that “common faith in Jesus Christ is slowly bringing us back together,” his own Christianity led him to a very different place than Falwell’s embrace of the president. “America has abandoned its leadership” on climate change, Carter said at one point. Discrimination against women and girls, he said, is the greatest issue facing the world, though he worries about nuclear war—and rattled off the countries with weapons, including Israel (which has never acknowledged its nuclear program or been recognized by the United States as having one).

Then he turned his eye back toward American history: “We’ve had a hard time adjusting to this concept of equality.”

America, he said, should have unchallenged military strength, but being a superpower means being a champion of peace, human rights, generosity.

“Every one of us decides: ‘This is the kind of person I choose to be.’ We decide whether we tell the truth or benefit from telling lies,” Carter said, setting the challenge for the graduates and the country. “We’re the ones to decide, ‘Do I hate, or am I filled with love?’ We’re the ones who decide, ‘Do I think only about myself or do I care for others?’”