Story highlights Tim Stanley: Jimmy Carter's defense of Trump makes more sense when you consider the similarities between the two presidents

Like Trump, Carter was a political outsider when he ran for office and often deviated from his party's establishment thinking, writes Stanley

Timothy Stanley is a historian and columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph. He is the author of "Citizen Hollywood: How the Collaboration Between LA and DC Revolutionized American Politics." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump make an unlikely pair. For Trump and his conservative base, Carter's presidency was defined by American decline. During the 2016 election, Carter said that Trump's campaign had "tapped a waiting reservoir... of racism."

And yet in an interview with The New York Times , Carter now says that Trump has been treated worse by the media than any president before -- and that he would be happy to go to North Korea to help the White House negotiate with Kim Jong Un. What alternate reality is this?

I suspect two things are going on here. First, the 93-year-old Carter is thinking about his own legacy. He might have had a miserable record as president, but post-presidency he's become a force for international peace and development -- and by offering to go to North Korea, he's informing Trump and the American public of the sterling work done by The Carter Center, an organization he established to improve lives by advancing democracy and resolving conflicts. Don't forget Carter's visit to North Korea in 1994 that facilitated a short-lived nuclear deal with the US.

But he isn't just looking for work. Carter is consciously or subconsciously reminding us of his unusual status in American politics. He has more in common with Trump than you might first think -- or at least less in common with the Democratic establishment than might be apparent.

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In some regards, Carter was the Trump of the 1976 presidential election. He was a businessman, a peanut farmer and, as a former governor of Georgia, an outsider in a Washington where many dismissed the Deep South as backward and reactionary.

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