Jimmy Carter, who considered himself an outsider when he sat in the Oval Office as the 39th U.S. president, will be honored with a lavish funeral at Washington National Cathedral on Thursday before a second service and funeral in his tiny Georgia hometown be held.

President Joe Biden, who was the first sitting senator to support Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, will praise his fellow Democrat 11 days before he leaves office. All of Carter’s living successors are expected to attend the funeral in Washington, including President-elect Donald Trump, who paid his respects in front of Carter’s casket on Wednesday.

The rare meeting of the commanders in chief is an example of how unusual Thursday will be for the nation. Days of formal ceremonies and commemorations from political leaders, business giants and ordinary citizens honored Carter for his decency and amazing work ethic to do more than just gain political power.

“He set the bar very high for presidents on how to use voice and leadership for good causes,” said Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder whose foundation funded Carter’s work to eliminate treatable diseases like Guinea worm. Gates spoke to The Associated Press on Wednesday shortly before flying to Washington for the funeral.

“Whatever prestige and resources you have, ideally you can leverage them and take an even broader societal perspective in your post-private sector career,” Gates said.

Bernice King, daughter of the murdered civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., compared the two Georgians and Nobel Peace Prize winners.

“Both President Jimmy Carter and my father showed us what is possible when your faith compels you to live and lead from a place of love,” said King, who also plans to to attend the service in Washington.

Ted Mondale, son of Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president, is expected to read a eulogy his father wrote for Carter before his own death in 2021.

Thursday will conclude six days of national rites that began in Plains, Georgia, where Carter was born in 1924, lived most of his life and died Dec. 29 at the age of 100. The ceremonies continued in Atlanta and Washington, where Carter, a former naval officer, engineer and peanut farmer, has been in state since Tuesday.

Long lines of mourners waited for several hours in freezing temperatures to pass his flag-draped coffin in the Capitol Rotunda as tributes focused on both Carter’s humanitarian work after leaving the White House and his achievements as president in 1977 concentrated until 1981.

After the morning service in Washington, Carter’s remains, his four children and his extended family will return to Georgia on a Boeing 747 that will serve as Air Force One when the sitting president is aboard.

The outspoken Baptist evangelical, who campaigned as a born-again Christian, will then be remembered this afternoon at a funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church, the small building where he taught Sunday school for decades after leaving the White House Coffin will rest under a memorial plaque made of wooden cross that he made in his own wood workshop.

After a final drive through his hometown, past the old train depot that served as headquarters for his 1976 presidential campaign, he will be buried on his family’s land in a grave next to former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who died in 2023 after a more than 77-year marriage .

Carter, who won the presidency and promised good government and honest conversation to an electorate disaffected by the Vietnam War and Watergate, signed significant legislation and negotiated a groundbreaking peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. But he also caused inflation, rising interest rates and international crises and lost in a landslide to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Two years later, he and Rosalynn founded the Carter Center in Atlanta as a nongovernmental organization that took them around the world to combat disease, mediate conflict, monitor elections, and advocate for racial and gender justice. The center, where Carter rested before coming to Washington, currently employs 3,000 people and contractors worldwide.

___

Associated Press writers Michael Liedtke in Indian Wells, Calif., and Kate Brumback in Atlanta contributed to this report.