A potential lame-duck Trump presidency 'looms as nation's most serious danger,' experts argue

Former President Herbert Hoover has emerged as a popular historical comparison for President Trump because of their respective responses to the Great Depression and the coronavirus pandemic. More recently, though, two University of Texas Scholars — Jeremi Suri and Jeffrey Tulis — argued in The Bulwark that Hoover's final months in office could be a precedent of what's to come for Trump.

Suri's and Tulis' warning is reliant on Trump losing his re-election bid to his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden (a Trump victory would render it moot). The academics write that after a resounding 1932 defeat to former President Franklin Roosevelt, "Hoover was so committed to a vision of the public interest at odds with that of his opponent that, during the interregnum, he sought to advance it and to thwart the policy designs of the incoming administration with every tool in his constitutional arsenal" while also attempting to "sow discord" and "undermine the economy."

Trump, Suri and Tulis write, wouldn't have as much time as Hoover to wield his authority — back in 1932, the presidential transition took place in March, not January — but they nonetheless "expect that a defeated President Trump, financially and legally desperate, will exploit this window for full value to himself, notwithstanding the harm to the country."

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Actions they anticipate from a lame-duck Trump include pardoning his friends and making "deals with foreign leaders in return for personal favors and ego boosts." That's why, in the eyes of Suri and Tulis, the last several weeks of a Trump presidency "looms as the nation's most serious danger," regardless of whether there's a threat to a peaceful transition of power. Read more at The Bulwark.