WASHINGTON — Foreign leaders are lining up to speak with him. He has rattled Mexico and Canada with the threat of high tariffs and warned that militants in Gaza would “pay hell” if they did not release the hostages by his swearing-in.

The That won’t happen for 45 days, but Donald Trump, the future president, is not afraid to act like the real president.

Trump is yet to sign a bill or issue an executive order, but he is ousting Joe Biden as the incumbent president winds down his term and fades further from the public eye. On two trips abroad since the election, Biden has answered every two questions from reporters.

He had to mock Trump’s comments – “I hope he reconsiders,” he said of Trump’s plan to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico – rather than pursue an agenda of his own.

As for Trump, “his view is that he won’t follow rules that he thinks are stupid,” said a former senior White House official in Trump’s first term. “In his opinion they are hostages. If he can help bring them home, why should he follow protocol when it impacts people’s lives?”

At this point, Trump is “basically already in charge, and he’s not even president yet,” the person added.

Trump’s penchant for wading into current affairs is testing the singular dictum that presidents should respect but usually do not for reasons of political expediency or practical necessity.

“He would probably argue, ‘I’m more than just a private citizen at this point; “I am the president-elect and in a few months I will have all the powers of the presidency. “But that doesn’t mean you can start before your inauguration,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif.

This weekend in Paris, Trump will join French President Emmanuel Macron at the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, five years after it was destroyed by fire. Biden was invited but chose not to attend, a White House official said.

Trump’s return to the world stage after a four-year hiatus, coupled with news of his appointments, has overshadowed Biden’s trip to sub-Saharan Africa this week, during which he faced the fallout from his son Hunter’s sweeping pardon.

“Given the weakness of the current president and the speed at which things are moving in the modern world, Trump is effectively a presumptive president,” said Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives and a Trump ally. “Surely foreign governments treat him that way.”

He did not indicate whether Biden was unhappy about being pushed into the background. In fact, Trump’s interventions could prove helpful to the extent that they complement Biden’s larger goals.

A senior Biden administration official cited Trump’s social media post warning that there would be “hell to pay” if the hostages were not freed from Gaza by Inauguration Day. That message does not detract from the Biden administration’s efforts to secure the release of the hostages in exchange for a ceasefire, the official said.

The first and primary task of an elected president is to build a Cabinet and senior team in the White House before the four-year term. But Trump and some of his predecessors have not hesitated to intervene in real-time crises when called upon.

As he prepared to take office in 2016, Trump sought to save jobs that the corporate parent of Carrier, a heating and air conditioning company, was moving from Indiana to Mexico.

And he weighed in on Boeing’s plans to build the next generation of presidential jets, criticizing the costs. “Cancel order!” He tweeted in 2016 as president-elect.

“If you think after 10 years that President Trump is somehow adhering to norms and traditions, you’re living under a rock,” Sean Spicer, Trump’s former White House press secretary, said in an interview. “This is not a guy who cares about traditions, norms, etc. He’s a guy who wants to get things done. He will not sit back and wait until Inauguration Day. And it works.”

At least one Republican lawmaker questioned whether Trump’s approach is actually working. After Trump warned that he would impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China if they did not crack down on migrant and drug traffic across the U.S. border, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate Florida to visit him.

Trudeau’s support in Canada has declined. He faces a tough re-election fight, and the spectacle of him rushing to Mar-a-Lago to get an audience with Trump risks making him look like a supplicant.

“I don’t think it’s wise for him (Trump) to humiliate Trudeau the way he did,” a Republican senator said on condition of anonymity to speak freely. “Canada is a good friend and no problem.”

The senator said: “Trump was elected to break some things, but he doesn’t have much of a mandate. This is a 50:50 country. We have a midterm election coming up and we have a year to deliver and it will be difficult to bring prices down with these tariffs.”

The idea that an elected president should defer to the sitting president when it comes to foreign policy is more than just a norm. It has its roots in the law. A 1936 Supreme Court ruling stated that the president has “exclusive power…as the sole arm 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 that.” be “President of the United States.”

One danger when a president-elect intervenes in an active debate before taking office is that something could go wrong, raising questions about who is responsible, Perry said.

For example, if Trump’s warning led Hamas to execute the hostages before he took office, “who would be responsible?” she asked.

Still, it has been difficult for the president-elect to stay away from issues they will soon inherit. Dwight D. Eisenhower traveled to Korea before his inauguration in 1953 to see for himself whether the war there could be won. On site, he met with South Korean President Syngman Rhee, rejected scenarios for an escalation of the war and was convinced that the fighting had to end.

Before Barack Obama took office in 2008 in the midst of the global financial crisis, he was selective about how he got involved. When President George W. Bush invited Obama to a meeting of world leaders to address the downturn, Obama declined. An Obama spokeswoman said: “We truly believed that there was only one president at a time and that George Bush was the president.”

Nevertheless, Obama intervened in the legislative debates at the time and called for an expansion of unemployment benefits. He was more reserved when it came to fighting between Palestinians and Israelis – an intractable dispute that, of course, continues to this day.

In a Washington Post article three weeks before Obama took office, a government professor was quoted as saying, “It seems clear that he is cherry-picking only the things that can serve his purpose and distancing himself as far as possible from the problems in the world.” Keeps the Middle East away.”