Tensions erupt between Obama and Trump, setting up fraught transition

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The anxious armistice between U.S. President Barack Obama and president-elect Donald Trump came to an abrupt halt Wednesday and put the United States on course for the rockiest presidential transition in at least six decades.

Cracks in the relationship have been evident for weeks, but the fissure between the two broke into the open when Mr. Obama's Secretary of State defended the American position in the United Nations on the issue of Israeli settlements and when Mr. Trump went to his Twitter account and banged out an unambiguous end to the surface niceties the two have laboured to present to a divided American public.

"Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks," the president-elect tweeted, responding to the President's comment that he could have beaten Mr. Trump if he weren't barred from a third term. "Thought it was going to be a smooth transition – NOT!"

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That "NOT!" confirmed what insiders knew and what analysts suspected, which is that this is turning out to be a presidential transition of abundant tension – a transition that grew even more strained when Secretary of State John Kerry, in a clear jab at both Mr. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, asserted on Wednesday that the Obama administration did not believe "friendship means the U.S. must accept any policy, regardless of our own interests, our own positions, our own words, our own principles."

For a while, Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump were almost chummy: tea and sympathy in the White House, warm words for each other, the ripostes of the election season – one was unfit to be president, the other was an unfit president – seemingly forgotten.

That's over now. This transition – with executive actions on the environment by Mr. Obama that Mr. Trump will be powerless to overturn, and with Mr. Trump inserting himself into a United Nations vote, and then deploring the Obama administration's decision – now is the most fraught transfer of power in generations; more than the uneasy way Harry Truman passed the presidency to Dwight Eisenhower 64 years ago, perhaps even more than the seething rivalry that marked the way Franklin Roosevelt succeeded Herbert Hoover after the election of 1932.

For it was Mr. Roosevelt who, in a letter to Mr. Hoover on Dec. 19, 1932, rebuffed the sitting president by refusing joint action to address the First World War debts of European nations, arguing, "I think you will recognize that it would be unwise for me to accept an apparent joint responsibility with you when, as a matter of constitutional fact, I would be wholly lacking in any attendant authority." That time, 84 years ago, the president-elect declined to get involved. This time, the president-elect can't resist getting involved.

As a result, Americans now are finding that their two presidents – the one in office and the one who takes office on Jan. 20 – simply can't get along.

Or maybe it is just that Mr. Trump has made it clear with his remarks and actions as the new year approaches that he simply is not going to go along with Mr. Obama's policies – and Mr. Obama, distrustful of what Mr. Trump will set in motion, has made it clear that he will try in his dwindling weeks in office to set in stone what Mr. Trump will not be able to chisel away.

First, there was Mr. Obama's implementation of a permanent ban on offshore drilling in portions of the Atlantic and the Arctic, an action the new president cannot overturn and one that unavoidably was interpreted as a response to Mr. Trump's enthusiasm for oil and gas drilling. Then came Mr. Trump's suggestion that the United States might undertake a new round of investment in nuclear weapons, swiftly interpreted as the president-elect's willingness to participate with Russia in a dangerous new arms race.

And then there was Mr. Trump's unprecedented intervention in a UN Security Council debate last week, a repudiation of the Obama approach to settlements in contested territories in Israel and a signal to Mr. Netanyahu that happier days are ahead for him. (Mr. Trump tweeted: "As to the U.N., things will be different after Jan. 20th.")

All this upended the notion of a smooth transition of power in the third week of January at a quietly understated ritual at the West Front of the Capitol in Washington.

"Ordinarily, if you're the president-elect, you want the current administration to co-operate with you as much as possible and ease the transition to the White House," George C. Edwards III, the respected Texas A&M University expert on the American presidency, said in an interview. "It is a difficult transition under the best of circumstances. But Trump seems to be more concerned about tweeting than in letting Obama [govern]. It's part of the tradition not to be involved."

But Mr. Trump has trampled on tradition from the start, and in fact considers his contempt for tradition a winning part of his portfolio; public-opinion polls have showed that his muscular rhetoric is part of the appeal he has for supporters – and part of the contempt he has from his opponents.

There have been a handful of difficult moments in presidential transition before Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump.

Mr. Truman, a Democrat who only 14 months earlier had, unsuccessfully, urged General Eisenhower to run for the presidential nomination of his own party, was stunned when his successor, elected in 1952 on the Republican ticket, refused to share a pleasant cup of coffee in the White House before the Inauguration Day festivities. Their frosty drive up Pennsylvania Avenue for the Eisenhower inauguration was filled with tension.

Some 16 years later, Lyndon Johnson was furious that Richard Nixon suggested he might fly to Paris or Saigon to "get the [Vietnam] negotiations off dead centre" – an intrusion that a Nixon biographer, Stephen E. Ambrose, described as an act "as bold and brazen as anything he had done in a career marked by boldness and brazen effrontery."

Historians disagree whether Anna Chennault, widow of the Second World War "Flying Tigers" General Claire Chennault, was Mr. Nixon's liaison in a secret and probably illegal effort to sabotage the Johnson effort to bring peace to Vietnam before the election – an initiative that Mr. Johnson described as "despicable."

Transitions in more recent years, however, have been more placid and pleasant.

When he relinquished office to his vice-president, Ronald Reagan left a warm note on his Oval Office desk to George H. W. Bush. Mr. Bush then continued the tradition, leaving one for Bill Clinton, who had defeated him in the bitter 1992 presidential election, saying, "I wish you great happiness here," and adding, "Your success is now our country's success. I am rooting hard for you."

The election eight years later was no less contentious, with Mr. Bush's son, the Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush, vowing, as he put it, to "restore honour and dignity" to the White House, a clear – and denigrating – reference to Mr. Clinton.

That June, the elder Mr. Bush sent me a series of personally typewritten answers to questions I had forwarded to him. The last paragraph said: "President Reagan left me a little note on my desk. I did the same for President Clinton on top of my Oval Office desk. I doubt this note will reappear should George win."

But he did win, and Mr. Clinton did leave a note, as the younger Mr. Bush did for Mr. Obama and as Mr. Obama may yet do for Mr. Trump. It will be the last mystery of a transition of frisson.

David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and a Pulitzer Prize-winner for his coverage of U.S. politics.