Elections in the USA: What can a sitting president in the United States do during the transition? | Elections USA

The answer to the question of what a sitting president can do in this 2020 election year is marked by the fact that that president is Donald Trump, an erratic, capricious and fickle man with politics and the decisions he makes from the House. White

After the presidential elections in November and until the new one that has come out of those elections is formed, Congress enters a period known as disabled (the translation into Spanish would be lame duck), which means that legislative activity is minimal and waiting for the new parliamentary course to start. The dates were established in 1933 in the 20th amendment to the US Constitution, which says that a new presidential cycle begins on January 20 and a new Congress begins on January 3.

Donald Trump is already a lame duck president but, if he also loses the elections, he automatically becomes a president to whom Congress will not accept any legislative initiative. Nor will he receive any that come from the Capitol. But, of course, this is Donald Trump, the man who in the early hours of the election and with millions of votes left to count, proclaimed himself the winner of the elections and since then has done nothing but muddy the democratic process.

Everything that the president has concocted or said in the last weeks before an election that will define that country for the next four years has lived up to his profile: mocking, defiant, grotesque. The president, oblivious to the rules and regulations, has created his own reality and his exclusive way of facing the facts, which predicts that the transition of power will be anything but normal and that all bizarre scenarios are possible.

Ex officio, the White House placed Chris Liddell, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, in front of the transition team for months. According to sources cited by the newspaper The Washington Post, Trump is so free verse that he was reluctant to sign the documentation required for a formal transition of the Administration. According to those same sources, the president “did not like” the idea of ​​participating in a transition because he considered it “bad karma.” He finally ended up stamping his signature when told it was required by law. The president made it clear that he did not want the event to be publicized.

Donald Trump will retain exactly the same powers he has now until a new president is sworn in on January 20. There is a four-page memorandum of understanding between Joe Biden’s campaign and the White House, which establishes almost like a minute the lines of communication between both sides, the agreements they can reach, the information they share and the information they cannot. be public ―intelligence and military strategy, among others―.

If it is true that legislatively Trump should not – in principle – attempt any adventure, or declare any war, it is no less true that this period is open to what is known as midnight actions, brash decisions made at the worst times. That term, in Trump’s case, is almost a definition of his personality. One possible scenario is that the president decides, for example, to fire Anthony Fauci, the greatest expert on the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Trump’s criticisms of Dr. Fauci have not stopped growing, since the president has been outraged by the scientist’s handling of the disease, very contrary to the ideas that the president has, who continues to downplay it despite of the more than 225,000 dead.

It is quite likely that the tycoon will grant a presidential pardon to some of his former collaborators or lawyers who are in jail. Bill Clinton made a statement of intent by signing the United States’ entry into the International Criminal Court hours before leaving the presidency. But it was just that, a nice gesture. The signature had to be ratified and by then the next president, George W. Bush, did not want any foreign court to ever try an American citizen, so today the United States does not belong to the Rome Statute. What could be taken for granted is that the president will not forgive his former lawyer Michael Cohen, as he considers him “a traitor.” But with Trump, anything is possible.

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