When President Joe Biden stopped by former President Jimmy Carter’s home in Plains, Georgia, in April 2021, it was more than just a show of respect from one commander in chief to another. It was the first time in the 40 years since Carter left the White House that any of his seven successors had visited him in his hometown.

Carter had a hot-and-cold relationship with the fellow members of the exclusive club of presidents — more cold than hot. From his reelection defeat in 1980 until his death Sunday, he was the odd man out, distant from the Republicans and Democrats who followed him and often getting on their nerves because of his outspokenness.

He did not join his fellow presidents on the high-dollar speaking circuit, nor did he team up for many joint humanitarian missions. When all of the living presidents gathered to welcome Barack Obama to the White House in 2009, Carter was the one standing slightly off to the side, removed from his peers physically and metaphorically.

To many of his successors, he was a thorn in their side, always doing his own thing even if it conflicted with official foreign policy. What he considered principled, they considered sanctimonious. While other former presidents generally held their tongues out of deference to the current occupant of the Oval Office, Carter rarely stood on ceremony.

“I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents,” he said in 2010.

He parachuted into trouble spots as an election observer, traveled to North Korea as a freelance negotiator and spoke out on Middle East politics. Often to the consternation of whoever happened to be in the White House at the time, he would meet with ostracized autocrats such as Syria’s Hafez Assad and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. When Carter earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, the award committee openly characterized it as a rebuke of President George W. Bush for planning to invade Iraq.

“Jimmy Carter’s not real keen on clubs,” Douglas Brinkley, author of “The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House,” said before the former president’s death. “The idea that he needs to be in photo ops with these other presidents is not his MO. His heroes in politics were Anwar Sadat and Mahatma Gandhi, not Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.”

Carter understood that he irritated the other presidents, but he evinced little concern about ruffling their feathers.

The pattern was set as soon as he left office in 1981 after being defeated by Ronald Reagan. The relationship between the two was “strained,” Carter later said. He considered Reagan dim and dangerous, and he was irritated that his successor never invited him to a state dinner at the White House.

Carter forged closer ties with President George H.W. Bush, and the two teamed up with Secretary of State James Baker to help end the long-running Contra war in Nicaragua. “I had a better relationship as a former president with Bush and Baker than any other president,” Carter said in 2015.

But even then, there was tension.

When Bush and Baker sought United Nations authorization to use force to counter Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Carter privately lobbied members of the Security Council to vote against the United States. Some top Bush officials, including Dick Cheney, then the defense secretary, considered that almost treason.

It was hardly better with his own party, though.

Carter had a prickly relationship with Clinton even though both were moderate Democrats from the South — or perhaps because of it.

Carter irritated Clinton by chiding the new president for sending his daughter, Chelsea, to a private school in Washington instead of to a public school as the older man had done with his own daughter, Amy. Clinton was so peeved that he snubbed Carter days later at the 1993 inaugural festivities.

Carter was critical of his fellow Democrat after revelations of Clinton’s extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky, which led to his impeachment in 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice. But Clinton nonetheless swallowed any irritation and flew to Atlanta in 1999 to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.

“To call Jimmy Carter the greatest former president in history, as many have, however, does not do justice either to him or to his work,” Clinton said.

Carter was more critical of George W. Bush, particularly over the Iraq invasion in 2003. “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Carter declared in 2007.

He softened somewhat when attending the opening of Bush’s presidential library in 2013, making no mention of their rift over Iraq and instead praising the Republican for helping end a war in Sudan and fighting poverty and the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

There was less overt tension between Carter and Obama, but little warmth, either.

Oddly, Carter had more sympathy at first for President Donald Trump, telling Maureen Dowd of The New York Times in 2017 that “the media have been harder on Trump than any other president” and offering support for his efforts to make peace with North Korea while knocking both Clinton and Obama. But his feelings hardened by the second half of Trump’s term.

After Carter sent Trump a letter about China policy, the sitting president called him on a Saturday night in April 2019 to discuss it, interrupting a dinner with friends in Georgia. Trump seemed delighted that the two agreed on China. But two months later, Carter publicly suggested that Trump had actually “lost the election and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”

Trump fired back, dismissing Carter as a “forgotten president.”

The only president Carter forged a genuine friendship with was the one he beat in 1976, Gerald Ford. Perhaps their relationship was better than the others because Ford came before Carter and, therefore, never had to contend with him as a predecessor making life difficult.

For those who followed him, Carter remained a hassle.

Joe Biden, the first senator to support Carter’s original White House bid in 1976, was largely spared this test as the former president headed into his latter 90s.

“It was no secret that Carter was not a member in good standing of the ex-presidents’ club, in part because he never accepted their code,” Jonathan Alter wrote in “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life,” published in 2020.