The Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, mistakenly offered his condolences to Jimmy Carter’s dead wife shortly after the Democratic former president died on Sunday.
Abbott’s statement sent “prayers and deepest condolences” to former first lady Rosalynn Carter and the rest of her family shortly after her husband’s death at the age of 100, as the Dallas news station WFAA reported. But Rosalynn Carter had died more than a year earlier – on 19 November 2023, at age 96.
The Democratic party of Collins county, Texas, seized on the blunder and wrote on X: “Did anyone in the governor’s office proof the condolence note?”
Another social media user wrote, “Condolences to Rosalynn Carter? She passed in Nov of 2023. WTF is wrong with you?”
A couple of hours passed before Abbott’s office distributed an amended statement about Jimmy Carter’s death that removed the reference to his late wife of 77 years, as the Houston Press noted.
The revised statement read: “Cecilia and I send our prayers and deepest condolences to the entire family.”
Both versions of Abbott’s statement were otherwise effusive about Jimmy Carter, who was US president from 1977 to 1981 and won the 2002 Nobel peace prize for his work seeking peaceful resolutions to global conflicts, advancing human rights and democracy, and promoting economic and social development.
“Our nation remains the greatest beacon of freedom and opportunity in the world because of our fearless chief executives who are our guiding force through the best and worst of times,” Abbott’s statement said in part as politicos around the world reacted to Carter’s death. “For that, we owe President Carter our enduring gratitude … and he will be greatly missed by many.”
Abbott’s gaffe on Sunday called to mind another episode that earned him unflattering news headlines. In the summer of 2023, as US conservatives denounced Bud Light for hiring the trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote its brand, Abbott shared a fake news article from a satirical website which claimed the country singer Garth Brooks had been jeered off stage by American “patriots” over his support of the beer.
“Go woke. Go Broke,” Abbott wrote on one of his social media accounts with respect to the fake article – which was published after Republicans became angry at Brooks for announcing that his bar in Nashville would serve Bud Light as well as asking his patrons to be tolerant.
Several fellow social media users pointed out that the article Abbott was passing along as if it were genuine news was from the Dunning-Kruger-Times satirical website. A disclaimer on the website discloses that its content is “parody, satire and tomfoolery”.
The governor quickly deleted his post having fun at Brooks’s expense. Yet he did not do so in time to avoid social media users taking screenshots of his error and mocking him for it.
“When I saw that, I was besides myself with joy,” Christopher Blair later told the Guardian in an interview. “He’s one of the dumbest people in the country.”
Coincidentally, Brooks and fellow country singer Trisha Yearwood – his wife – helped lead the 2024 Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project with Habitat for Humanity, which resulted in 30 new homes being built in St Paul, Minnesota, as part of an affordable housing initiative there.
Abbott has been Texas’s governor since 2015, pursuing an agenda that exalts the gun industry, opposes immigration and seeks to infuse public education with Christianity.
