UNITED STATES - As Donald Trump prepares to enter the final days of his presidency - which could well be his worst - Americans are worried about what is in store for a president who proposed shooting migrants and using nuclear weapons against hurricanes.
As excessive, reckless and thoughtless as he has been so far, his critics point out that it was election time, which is no longer the case. Beaten by Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, he no longer needs to moderate himself.
"He'll do everything he can to stir up trouble", says Michael Cohen, the president's former personal lawyer, who was tried and sentenced to three years in prison for, among other things, buying the silence of women who had relations with Donald Trump just before the 2016 election.
According to him, the President "will go on TV, radio and the press to complain that these elections were stolen from him by fraud and foreign interference. He will never admit that he owes his defeat to his incompetence and arrogance".
Trump to leave the White House on 20 January
The winner, Joe Biden, is due to take office at noon on 20 January 2021, but Donald Trump retains his presidential prerogatives for another 75 days, including his role as head of the US armed forces and nuclear weapons.
He said he had no intention of facilitating the transition of power because of the FBI investigation into Russian assistance he allegedly received during the 2016 campaign, which the president calls "espionage."
"Are we talking about the transition I had when you spied on my campaign and when you tried to bring down the President of the United States?" he railed again last week at a rally in Pennsylvania.
The White House declined all requests for comment on this matter.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former senior official believes that the concerns expressed by Michael Cohen and others are exaggerated. "I don't think he'll do anything out of the ordinary", he said of the President.
But a long-standing adviser, who also prefers to remain anonymous, fully expects Donald Trump to demand the resignation of Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease specialist on the coronavirus pandemic task force. He could also fire Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, and Gina Haspel, the director of the CIA, who have repeatedly contradicted him. "Either he's going to fire Wray, Fauci and Haspel and make a fuss, or he's going to hold his nose to make himself look good. It'll be interesting to see. And it's 50-50," he adds.
What if Trump spent all his time playing golf?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and specialist in authoritarian regimes at New York University, is sure that the outgoing president "will take revenge on those who have shown him a lack of loyalty". Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who acted as the Democrats' lawyer in the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, predicts 11 busy weeks for the President and his team.
According to him, we can expect "all sorts of executive orders to invalidate other Obama-era regulations, the adoption of new regulations on the sly, attempts to intimidate and neutralise various government agencies, and him using the levers of power to advance the pawns that will serve his financial interests after the presidency. Not to mention a record number of presidential pardons" for his accomplices.
Of course, regulations that have been improperly drafted and adopted can always be invalidated by legal action. Even those that are properly drafted in the final months of the administration could be quickly repealed by the new Congress, and all its executive orders immediately rescinded by Joe Biden as soon as he takes office.
Other people familiar with Donald Trump question the interest he will show in his duties if he loses the election. Anthony Scaramucci, an old friend of the president who briefly served as a White House adviser, sums up the leader's most likely end-of-term agenda in three words: "Play golf". Which is what he was doing when his defeat was announced to the world.
This article, published on Le HuffPost US, was translated by Valeriya Macogon for Fast ForWord.
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