Lhe presidential election in the United States – so long, abnormal, agonizing, contested – is finally over. The Trump presidency continues. It is indeed one of the many anomalies of the American system to provide for a transition period of more than two months during which the outgoing administration has all the powers it enjoyed before the election. It is not uncommon for a president, freed from political constraints, to take the opportunity to take controversial measures. It is during this in-between, for example, that President Gerald Ford forgives Richard Nixon, his predecessor, forced by the scandal to resign; that President Ronald Reagan initiate a dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization, a subject hitherto taboo; that George HW Bush intervenes militarily in Somalia; or that Barack Obama allows the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution declaring Israeli settlements illegal. But while almost all of the former White House tenants made use of this interval, none of those tenants was Donald Trump or looked like him.
Let us pass on the decisions which he is liable to take in order either to protect himself and his family, or to take revenge on those who, in his eyes, would have betrayed him: repeated presidential pardons or mass dismissals of member officials. of the so-called deep state.
Making its mark on world order
For the rest of the world, what matters is that Trump will remain for many weeks the commander-in-chief, mastermind of diplomatic decisions, military maneuvers and clandestine operations. During his presidency, he will rarely have hesitated to use his prerogatives for dubious reasons: financial motivations (as was the case, it seems, in his relations with Turkey), politicians (his impeachment procedure is provoked, remember, by his demand that Ukraine cooperate in his attempt to smear Joe Biden in exchange for a delivery of arms), or, quite simply, vindictive, driven by the desire to dismantle the legacy of his predecessor (rejection the nuclear deal with Iran, the Paris climate accord and many more). We can appreciate his recent diplomatic initiatives differently, starting with the agreements between Israel on the one hand, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan on the other – to welcome the normalizations long pursued by Washington or, on the contrary, to deplore the fact that they do nothing to advance peace in the Middle East and everything to further bury the Palestinian question. But there is no doubt that their timing reflects an electoral calculation on the part of Trump, eager to prove himself a peerless negotiator before polling day.
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