WASHINGTON — Foreign leaders have lined up to speak with him. He has rattled Mexico and Canada with threats of steep tariffs and warned there would be “hell to pay” for militants in Gaza unless they release the hostages by the time he’s sworn in.
That won’t happen for another 45 days, but Donald Trump, the president-in-waiting, isn’t shying away from acting like the president-in-reality.
Trump can’t sign a bill or issue an executive order yet, but he is crowding out Joe Biden as the sitting president winds down his term and steadily recedes from public view. In two foreign trips since the election, Biden has answered all of two questions from reporters.
He has been left to kibitz about Trump’s pronouncements — “I hope he rethinks it,” he said of Trump’s plan to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico — rather than drive an agenda of his own.
As for Trump, “his view is that he’s not going to follow rules that he thinks are stupid rules,” said a former senior White House official in Trump’s first term. “His view is these are hostages and if he can help bring them home, then why would he follow protocol if it’s going to impact peoples’ lives?”
At this point, Trump is “already basically running things, and he’s not even president yet,” the person added.
Trump’s penchant for plunging into current affairs is testing the one-at-a-time dictum that presidents are supposed to honor but, for reasons of political expediency or practical necessity, usually don’t.
“He would probably argue, ‘I’m more than a private citizen at this point; I’m president-elect, and I’m going to have all the powers of the presidency in a couple of months.’ But that doesn’t mean you get to start before you’re inaugurated,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif.
This weekend, Trump will join French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral five years after it was devastated by fire. Biden was invited but opted not to attend, a White House official said.
Trump’s return to the world stage after a four-year hiatus, coupled with news about his hires, has overshadowed Biden’s trip to sub-Saharan Africa this week, in which he faced fallout from the sweeping pardon he gave his son Hunter.
“Given the weakness of the current president and the speed at which things develop in the modern world, Trump is, in effect, a presumptive president,” said Newt Gingrich, a Republican former House speaker and a Trump ally. “Certainly, foreign governments are treating him that way.”
If Biden is unhappy about being upstaged, he hasn’t offered any hints. In fact, Trump’s interventions may prove helpful to the degree they complement Biden’s larger goals.
A senior Biden administration official cited Trump’s social media post warning of “hell to pay” unless the hostages are freed from Gaza by Inauguration Day. That message doesn’t hurt the Biden administration’s efforts to secure the hostages’ release in exchange for a ceasefire, the official said.
A president-elect’s first and overriding task is to build a Cabinet and a senior White House team ahead of the four-year term. But Trump and a few of his predecessors haven’t hesitated to dip a toe into real-time crises if so moved.
As he prepared to take office in 2016, Trump tried to salvage jobs that the corporate parent of Carrier, a heating and air conditioning company, had planned to move from Indiana to Mexico.
And he weighed in on Boeing’s plans to build the next generation of presidential aircraft, decrying the expense. “Cancel order!” he tweeted as president-elect in 2016.
“After 10 years, if you think that President Trump is somehow abiding by norms and traditions, you’ve been living under a rock,” Sean Spicer, Trump’s former White House press secretary, said in an interview. “This is not a guy who is concerned about traditions, norms, etc. He’s a guy who wants to get stuff done. He’s not going to sit back and wait until Inauguration Day. And it works.”
At least one Republican lawmaker questioned whether Trump’s approach does, indeed, work. After Trump warned that he would slap tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China unless they cracked down on the movement of migrants and drugs across the U.S. border, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, to see him.
Trudeau’s support in Canada has been slipping. He faces a tough re-election bid, and the spectacle of him racing to Mar-a-Lago for an audience with Trump risked making him look like a supplicant.
“I don’t think it’s smart for him [Trump] to humiliate Trudeau like he has,” a Republican senator said, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk freely. “Canada is a good friend and is not a problem.”
The senator said: “Trump was elected to break some plates, but he doesn’t have a huge mandate. This is a 50-50 country. We’ve got midterm [elections] coming and we’ve got one year to deliver, and it’s going to be hard to get prices down with these tariffs.”
More than a norm, the idea that a president-elect should defer to the sitting president in the realm of foreign policy has roots in law. A Supreme Court ruling in 1936 held that the president possesses “exclusive power … as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.”
Barbara Perry, a professor of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs, said the ruling confirms the court’s view that “the Founding Fathers and the Constitution want the United States to speak with one voice, and that voice should be the president of the United States.”
One danger of a president-elect’s injecting himself into an active debate before he takes office is that something could go wrong, raising the question of who would be accountable, Perry said.
If Trump’s warning prompted Hamas to execute the hostages before he took office, for example, “who would be responsible for that?” she asked.
Still, presidents-elect have been hard-pressed to absent themselves from issues they’ll be inheriting before long. Dwight D. Eisenhower traveled to Korea ahead of his inauguration in 1953 to see for himself whether the war there was winnable. On the ground, he met with South Korean President Syngman Rhee, dismissed scenarios for escalating the war and came away convinced the fighting needed to end.
Barack Obama was selective in how he chose to engage before he took office in the thick of a global financial crisis in 2008. When President George W. Bush invited Obama to a meeting of world leaders devoted to the downturn, Obama declined. An Obama spokeswoman said, “We really felt strong that there was only one president at a time and George Bush was the president.”
Yet Obama injected himself into legislative debates at the time, calling for extending unemployment benefits. He was more reticent when it came to fighting between Palestinians and Israelis — an intractable dispute that, of course, continues to this day.
A Washington Post article three weeks before Obama took office quoted a government professor as saying, “It seems clear he’s just cherry-picking those things that can serve his purpose and staying as far away from Middle East troubles as he can.”
