What's the most damaging thing a lame duck president has ever done?

[aurora_maire]

Doing a little research, it seems that most acts by lame duck presidents just involve political machinations.

Examples include last-minute midnight regulations issued by executive agencies of outgoing US presidential administrations and executive orders issued by outgoing presidents.[4] Such actions date back to the Judiciary Act of 1801 (“Midnight Judges Act”), in which Federalist President John Adams and the outgoing 6th Congress amended the Judiciary Act to create more federal judge seats for Adams to appoint and the Senate to confirm before the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated and the Democratic-Republican majority 7th Congress convened.

There is an example of when an incoming president did do something that harmed the country and the lame duck president. But he didn’t do it to specifically harm the country. That was a byproduct of his decision and he went on to be one of the most respected presidents.

One example was the 146 day–long presidential transition period (November 8, 1932 to March 4, 1933) at the end of Herbert Hoover’s presidency, prior to the start of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. After the election, Roosevelt refused Hoover’s requests for a meeting to come up with a joint program to stop the crisis and calm investors, claiming it would limit his options, and as this “guaranteed that Roosevelt took the oath of office amid such an atmosphere of crisis that Hoover had become the most hated man in America”.[2] During this time, the U.S. economy suffered as thousands of banks failed.[3]

[Lame duck (politics) - Wikipedia]

We’ve had some bad presidents in these 256 years but I don’t believe that any of them were ever as hateful, spiteful and vain to believe that they should intentionally harm the country because they lost. Trump will be exceptional in that regard should he lose.