Category: Unpresidential

Trump Threatens German Carmaker Buyers with 35 Percent U.S. Import Tax

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U.S President-elect Donald Trump warned German car companies he would impose a border tax of 35 percent on vehicles imported to the U.S. market, a plan that drew sharp rebukes from Berlin and hit the automakers’ shares.

In an interview with German newspaper Bild, published on Monday, Trump criticized German carmakers such as BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen for failing to produce more cars on U.S. soil.

“If you want to build cars in the world, then I wish you all the best. You can build cars for the United States, but for every car that comes to the USA, you will pay 35 percent tax,” Trump said in remarks translated into German.

“I would tell BMW that if you are building a factory in Mexico and plan to sell cars to the USA, without a 35 percent tax, then you can forget that,” Trump said.

Volkswagen (VW) shares closed down 2.2 percent, while BMW and Daimler’s shares ended 1.5 percent lower.

Under pressure to deliver on campaign promises to revive U.S. industrial jobs, Trump has turned his fire on carmakers that use low-cost Mexican plants to serve the U.S. market. He has also warned Japan’s Toyota it could be subject to a “big border tax” if it builds its Corolla cars for the U.S. market at a planned factory in Mexico.

All three German carmakers have invested heavily in Mexico, but also pointed out on Monday that they manufacturer in the United States as well.

BMW executive Peter Schwarzenbauer told reporters the company was sticking to plans to invest around $1 billion in a new plant in Mexico, which is due to go into production in 2019 and create at least 1,500 jobs.

SERIOUS WARNING

“The president’s powers are considerable. He can legally impose tariffs of up to 15 percent for 150 days. Trump is not constrained by Congress,” said Simon Evenett, professor of international trade at Switzerland’s University of St Gallen.

“Even if foreign companies object and seek to challenge the legality of tariffs, it will take at least 18 months to get decided. Corporate strategies will be disrupted by then.”

While investing in Mexico, German carmakers have quadrupled light vehicle production in the United States over the past seven years to 850,000 units, more than half of which are exported from there, Germany’s VDA automotive industry association said.

“In the long term, the United States would be shooting itself in the foot by imposing tariffs or other trade barriers,” VDA President Matthias Wissmann said in a statement.

German carmakers employ about 33,000 workers in the United States and German automotive suppliers about 77,000 more, the VDA said.

Speaking in tabloid newspaper Bild, German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said that rather than trying to penalize German carmakers, the United States should instead respond by building better and more desirable cars.

Norbert Roettgen, head of Germany’s foreign affairs committee, said Berlin needed to take Trump’s comments seriously. “He seems to be absolutely focused on short-term job interests and security interests … not that he is looking for free trade so much, but more for protection,” he told Reuters.

MEXICAN PLANS

Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz and BMW already have sizeable factories in the United States where they build higher-margin sports utility vehicles (SUVs) for export to Asia and Europe.

Around 65 percent of BMW’s production from its factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, is exported overseas. BMW builds the X3, X4, X5 and X6 models in the United States.

“It is surprising that Trump singles out the carmaker that exports more vehicles from the United States than any other manufacturer,” Evercore ISI analysts said.

A BMW spokeswoman said the planned plant in the central Mexican city of San Luis Potosi would build the BMW 3 Series from 2019, with the output intended for the world market. The plant would be an addition to existing 3 Series production facilities in Germany and China.

In June last year, BMW broke ground on the plant, pledging to invest $2.2 billion in Mexico by 2019 for annual production of 150,000 cars.

Daimler has said it plans to begin assembling Mercedes-Benz vehicles in 2018 from a $1 billion facility shared with Renault-Nissan in Aguascalientes in Mexico. A spokesman for Daimler declined to comment on Trump’s remarks.

Last year, VW’s Audi division inaugurated a $1.3 billion production facility with 150,000 vehicle production capacity near Puebla, Mexico. Audi said it would build electric and petrol Q5 SUVs in Mexico.

Audi declined to comment on Monday. VW also declined to comment on Trump’s remarks but noted it was investing another $900 million in its U.S. plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Trump called Germany a great car producer, saying Mercedes-Benz cars were a frequent sight in New York, but claimed there was not enough reciprocity. Germans were not buying Chevrolets at the same rate, he said, calling the business relationship an unfair one-way street.

Chevrolet sales have fallen sharply in Europe since parent company General Motors (GM.N) in 2013 said it would drop the Chevrolet brand in Europe by the end of 2015. Since then, GM has focused instead on promoting its Opel and Vauxhall marques.

Asked by Reuters whether Trump could take any steps to make it easier for GM to sell more American-made cars in Europe, GM Chief Executive Mary Barra said the company aimed to build cars in markets where they are sold.

“We’re a global company so we’re going to continue that focus just because from an economic perspective that generally turns out to be the best framework,” she said. “I think there is a lot that we can work on with President-elect Trump.”

(h/t Reuters)

Tape Shows Trump Contradicting Himself (Again) on Putin Meeting

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President-elect Donald Trump told a radio interviewer in October 2015 that he had met Vladimir Putin “one time … a long time ago” and that he “got along with him great” — a statement that conflicts with his later denials during the campaign that he had ever met or spoken with the Russian president.

The newly surfaced audiotape, uncovered by a political opposition-research group, could fuel new questions about the precise nature of Trump’s past relations with the Russian president — a subject about which he has made multiple contradictory comments. It was released just hours after Putin, speaking from Moscow, denounced officials in the Obama administration as “worse than prostitutes” for circulating “nonsense” personal allegations about Trump that were allegedly collected by Russian intelligence.

On the newly uncovered audiotape, released by the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, Trump discusses Putin with conservative radio host Michael Savage, telling him “it’s wonderful” that the Russians were “really hitting ISIS hard” in Syria.

“Have you ever met Vladimir Putin?” Savage asks.

“Yes,” Trump answers, emphatically.

“You have?” Savage follows up.

“Yes, a long time ago. We got along great, by the way.”

Savage then asked, “If you win the presidency, do you feel you can do business with Vladimir?”

“Yes, I do. I think I would get along very well. I had the Miss Universe pageant, believe it or not, in Moscow two years ago. I got many of the Russian leaders, the top people in Russia, honestly. … These are people, they are looking to do things.”

Trump’s responses to Savage add to the confusing, flatly contradictory comments the president-elect has made about his past dealings with the Russian president. While in Moscow during the Miss Universe content, Trump gave an interview to MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts — who was co-hosting the event — in which, when asked whether he had a “relationship” with Putin, he replied: “I do have a relationship, and I can tell you that he’s very interested in what we’re doing here today.” He later said in a National Press Club speech in November 2015 that while in Moscow for the Miss Universe contest: “I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer.”

But later, when repeatedly pressed last July 31 by ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos, Trump gave a very different answer about Putin. “I’ve never met him,” Trump said then. “I have no relationship with Putin. I don’t think I’ve ever met him. I never met him. … I mean if he’s in the same room or something. But I don’t think so.”

“You’ve never spoken to him on the phone?” Stephanopoulos followed up.

“I have never spoken to him on the phone, no,” Trump replied. “Well, I don’t know what it means by having a relationship. I mean, he was saying very good things about me, but I don’t have a relationship with him. I didn’t meet him. I haven’t spent time with him. I didn’t have dinner with him. I didn’t go hiking with him. I don’t know — and I wouldn’t know him from Adam, except I see his picture and I would know what he looks like.”

During the Stephanopoulos interview, Trump sought to clarify comments he made about Putin during a November 2015 debate on the Fox Business channel. In the debate, when discussing Putin and the Ukraine crisis, Trump said, “I got to know him [Putin] very well because we were both on 60 Minutes. We were stablemates, and we did very well that night.”

In the Stephanopoulos interview, Trump explained what he meant. “We did ’60 Minutes’ together,” Trump said. “By the way, not together-together, meaning he was probably shot in Moscow. … And I was shot in New York.”

Trump’s comments prompted Politifact, the fact-checking website, to give Trump a “full flop” last August for his comments about Putin. The surfacing of the Savage audio seemingly adds to the confusion. Its discovery comes just a few days after the Senate Intelligence Committee announced it will be conducting a full-scale investigation — including the use of subpoenas — into the Russian hacking of the election, including “any intelligence” about “links” between the Russian government and any political campaigns in the United States.

A spokesman for the Trump transition did not respond to a request for comment.

(h/t Yahoo News)

Trump Will Consider ‘Day One’ to Be Monday, Not His Inauguration

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Donald Trump will be inaugurated on Friday, but he’ll consider his first day on the job to be Monday.

The detail emerged after he sat down with British and German journalists over the weekend and offered up his thoughts on a wide range of topics.

“I mean my day one is gonna be Monday because I don’t want to be signing and get it mixed up with lots of celebration,” he said.

One of the first orders Trump said he’ll sign will cover “strong borders.”

The Times of London published the interview on its website Sunday, and CBS News posted part of the interview online.

(h/t The Boston Globe)

Newt Gingrich: Trump Should Use The CNN Confrontation As An Excuse To Break The Press

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Newt Gingrich, a prominent supporter of President-elect Donald Trump and a Fox News contributor, would like to shatter the influence of an “adversarial” press. And he thinks Trump’s press conference confrontation with CNN reporter Jim Acosta has given the incoming administration the opportunity to dramatically reshape White House press interactions to favor journalists who will treat the president-elect more favorably.

During Trump’s January 11 presser, he lashed out at CNN  and demanded the network apologize for a recent report on his alleged ties to Russia, and Acosta repeatedly called out, seeking to ask a question in response. Trump replied by calling CNN “terrible,” castigating Acosta for being “rude,” and declaring, “I’m not going to give you a question. You are fake news!” Sean Spicer, who will serve as Trump’s White House press secretary, subsequently told Acosta that he would be removed if he continued to press for a question, and Spicer later demanded that the reporter apologize to the president-elect.

Team Trump’s efforts seem intended to both damage the credibility of CNN and cow other networks into shying away from similarly critical journalism — as Gingrich put it, to “shrink and isolate” the network. But the Fox News contributor wants the incoming administration to go even further and use the incident as an excuse to “close down the elite press.”

Gingrich laid out this strategy during an interview on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, one of the most pro-Trump venues available. He urged Spicer to learn “a couple of big lessons” from the incident. First and foremost, he suggested that Acosta be banned from reporting on Trump events for 60 days “as a signal, frankly, to all the other reporters that there are going to be real limits” for proper behavior.

https://mediamatters.org/embed/clips/2017/01/13/51770/fnc-hannity-1132017-gingrich2

But Gingrich’s recommendations went far beyond chastising Acosta. He urged Trump to stop prioritizing questions from major news outlets due to their tough coverage and confrontational attitude. Instead, he suggested that he “extend the privileges to reporters from out of town, folks that fly in from all over the country to be allowed to be at a briefing.” Those reporters, Gingrich suggested, would be “a lot more courteous” and “responsible” rather than being “adversarial.”

Gingrich went on to explain his theory of the press under the Trump administration. “You don’t have to think of The New York Times or CNN or any of these people as news organizations,” he explained. “They’re mostly propaganda organizations. And they’re going to be after Trump every single day of his presidency.”

“And he needs to understand that that’s the case, and so does Sean Spicer in speaking for him. And they simply need to go out there and understand they have it in their power to set the terms of this dialogue.” He added, “They can close down the elite press.”

Trump has already started to take steps like those Gingrich describes. During the 2016 campaign, he reportedly made a deal with the right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns television stations across the country, to provide more access to its stations in exchange for a promise from Sinclair to broadcast his interviews without commentary.

He took questions from sycophantic pro-Trump outlets Breitbart.com and One America News Network during this week’s press conference. Right Side Broadcasting Network, which has been described as “the unofficial version of Trump TV,” claims it will be in the White House press briefing room under the new president. Other right-wing outlets like Laura Ingraham’s LifeZette and Alex Jones’ conspiracy website Infowars could be next.

Alexey Kovalev, a Russian journalist who has covered Vladimir Putin’s annual press conferences, warned of the use of such tactics in a searing “message to my doomed colleagues in the American media” that he authored following Trump’s press conference.

“A mainstay of Putin’s press conferences is, of course, softball questions,” Kovalev wrote. These include both “hyperlocal issues that a president isn’t even supposed to be dealing with,” which nonetheless provide “a real opportunity for him to shine.” Putin also benefits from “people from publications that exist for no other reason than heaping fawning praise on him and attacking his enemies.”

“But there will also be one token critic who will be allowed to ask a ‘sharp’ question,” Kovalev added, “only to be drowned in a copious amount of bullshit, and the man on the stage will always be the winner (‘See? I respect the media and free speech’).”

Of course we are not there yet, but the precedent is unnerving. Gingrich wants nothing more than a cowed, broken press that exists solely to promote the Republican Party’s message. We’ll see soon enough how much of his advice Trump takes.

Update

Gingrich is not alone in urging Trump to freeze out the press. Following Trump’s election, Hannity stated that “until members of the media come clean about colluding with the Clinton campaign and admit that they knowingly broke every ethical standard they are supposed to uphold, they should not have the privilege, they should not have the responsibility of covering the president on behalf of you, the American people.”

“In other words, the mainstream press should not be allowed to cover Trump,” New York University’s Jay Rosen wrote in response to Hannity’s comments. “A few years ago that was a bridge too far. Now it’s a plausible test of poisoned waters.” It looks like we’ll see more of those tests in the days to come.

(h/t Media Matters)

 

Trump Revisits Clinton Criticism in Tweets: She’s Guilty as Hell’

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News that the Justice Department’s inspector general had announced a review of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server was received warmly on Thursday by staff members from her presidential campaign.

On Friday, President-elect Donald Trump wondered aloud why Clinton’s team was so enthused.

“What are Hillary Clinton’s people complaining about with respect to the F.B.I. Based on the information they had she should never have been allowed to run – guilty as hell,” Trump wrote on Twitter Friday morning. “They were VERY nice to her. She lost because she campaigned in the wrong states – no enthusiasm!”

The FBI’s investigation into the homebrew email system Clinton maintained during her tenure as secretary of state was a thorn that her campaign was unable to remove from its side throughout the election. The issue was seemingly closed in early July when FBI Director James Comey announced at a press conference that Clinton’s system did not rise to the level of criminal activity and that he would recommend against filing any criminal charges.

But the email issue unexpectedly resurfaced 11 days before the election when Comey wrote a letter to Congress announcing that the bureau was examining potentially new evidence in the case. That new evidence ultimately amounted to nothing, but on a conference call with donors just days after her defeat, Clinton herself blamed Comey’s letter for her loss.

“My reaction is that it’s entirely appropriate and very necessary but also not surprising,” Clinton’s campaign press secretary Brian Fallon said Thursday on MSNBC when asked about the inspector general’s announced review. “Because the deviations from the protocols at the FBI and the Justice Department were so glaring and egregious in terms of their handling of not just the email investigation into Secretary Clinton but just in general, the amount of leaks that were coming from the FBI throughout the election and even post-election, is something that…I think most observers and former officials at the Justice Department realized cried out for an independent review.”

Joel Benenson, a pollster and strategist for Clinton’s campaign, said that Comey’s last minute letter to Congress manifested itself in polling data as a drag on enthusiasm towards the former secretary of state and a boost in momentum for Trump’s supporters. Benenson was clear that “nobody’s trying to relitigate the election here,” but that the FBI’s public actions so close to Election Day are worthy of further scrutiny.

“If you go back and look at what professionals said at the time, Mr. Comey made his announcement 11 days before an election, Republican and democratic prosecutors, former FBI people, said this was inappropriate, this was unprecedented, it violated every principle in the FBI,” Benenson said in his own appearance on MSNBC Thursday. “I think when prosecutors abuse their power, and people inside that agency advised him not to take that action, it is appropriate they look into this to make sure that if he did violate rules, procedures, he’s held accountability like anybody else would be.”

(h/t Politico)

Reality

The FBI cleared Hillary Clinton in July and AGAIN in November.

Trump Just Used His Presidential Power to Advertise a Donor

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After the co-owner of retailer L.L. Bean expressed support for President-elect Donald Trump, the future leader of the United States urged his 19.6 million Twitter followers to buy the company’s goods.

The unprecedented endorsement came less than two hours after Linda Bean said on a talk show early Thursday that anti-Trump groups are browbeating American businesses, an effort she called “un-American.” “It’s a case of bullying,” Bean said on Fox and Friends. “I’m not going to back down. I never back down.”

Bean, a granddaughter of L.L. Bean founder Leon Leonwood Bean, contributed $30,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC called Making America Great Again LLC between August and October of last year, according to recently amended federal filings. Another $15,000 was contributed by Maine resident Diana Bean, the name of Linda’s sister.

The PAC, which also goes by Making Maine Great Again, ran a spate of TV and radio ads in the state toward the end of the campaign.

It was not until this month, however, that Linda Bean’s support for Trump burst into public view, when the Federal Election Commission alerted the group that it had erroneously formed as a traditional PAC, which can legally only accept donations up to $5,000.

That prompted Grab Your Wallet, a boycott effort against companies that carry Trump brand products or have other connections to the president-elect, to add L.L. Bean to its list. Organizers have said they will not take L.L. Bean off its website until Linda Bean is ejected from the board.

The company has asked for the boycott to be dropped, saying that the corporation has no connection to the PAC.

“We are deeply troubled by the portrayal of L.L.Bean as a supporter of any political agenda,” Executive Chairman Shawn Gorman posted on Facebook on Jan. 8. “L.L.Bean does not endorse political candidates, take positions on political matters, or make political contributions.”

Katherine DeCelles, a Harvard business professor who focuses on ethics, said no White House leader in modern history has used their platform to hawk products.

“It’s unprecedented,” she said, “for someone of his power voicing his support or being against particular companies.”

Federal employees are legally forbidden from endorsing private firms. Though the president is exempt from the rule and the president-elect is not a federal employee, such endorsements are largely frowned upon in America’s highest office.

In 2009, after a coat company used a photo of President Obama in an ad campaign, Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama administration, told the New York Times that, “the White House has a long-standing policy disapproving of the use of the president’s name and likeness for commercial purposes.”

Amanda Schreyer, an advertising and social media lawyer in Boston, said Trump’s tweet broke no laws Thursday. He’s entitled to free speech (but could face lawsuits if he distributes false information about a company and hurts its profit).

“It’s just poor form,” Schreyer said. The president-elect, she added, “shouldn’t be picking and choosing which companies to endorse or otherwise.”

Since the election, Trump has made a practice of praising and chastising private companies. Last month, he slammed air conditioning company Carrier for moving jobs from Indiana to Mexico. He also has criticized several automakers for offshoring jobs and Boeing for the cost of its new Air Force One.

Trump’s tweets tend to spark publicity storms around his targets. Kellan Terry, a data analyst at Brandwatch, said online mentions of L.L. Bean have surged 990 percent since Wednesday, jumping from 2,200 to 22,000.

David Mayer, a leadership and ethics in business professor at the University of Michigan, said it’s natural for people to want to reward those who demonstrate loyalty. But reciprocity from the president-elect, he said, is problematic for the free market, creating incentive for executives to craft their messaging around pleasing the country’s leader.

“You gain advantages from the government for supporting it,” Mayor said. “And when that happens, you could also become afraid to criticize the government.”

(h/t Washington Post)

 

 

 

Trump Barred Reporters From Examining Stacks of Folders at Press Conference

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President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday wouldn’t allow reporters to see piles of documents displayed at his press conference, which he and lawyers said detailed his plans to disentangle himself from his business.

“These papers are just some of the many documents I’ve signed turning over complete and total control to my sons,” Trump said during his press conference, standing next to a table stacked with manila folders.

“They are not going to discuss [the business] with me,” Trump said of his sons. “Again, I don’t have to do this. They’re not going to discuss it with me.”

CNN reported that the press was not allowed to take a closer look at the documents. The Associated Press similarly reported that Trump staffers blocked journalists from looking at the folders.

Trump announced Wednesday that he is handing control of his business empire to his two adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and placing his assets into a trust. The press conference was the first Trump has held since the election and included long-awaited details of how the president-elect plans to avoid conflicts of interest when sworn into office.

The head of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) slammed Trump’s plans to separate himself from his business as “wholly inadequate” in resolving conflicts of interest.

“The plan the president-elect has announced doesn’t meet the standards that the best of his nominees are meeting and that every president in the last four decades have met,” OGE Director Walter Shaub said during a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Shaub added that the plan isn’t a true blind trust.

(h/t The Hill)

Reality

Trump Spokesman Threatened to Expel CNN’s Jim Acosta

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CNN’s Senior White House Correspondent Jim Acosta said Donald Trump’s spokesman Sean Spicer threatened to expel him from Trump Tower if he attempted to ask another question after a contentious exchange with the president-elect during Wednesday’s news conference.

“After I asked and … demanded that we have a question, Sean Spicer, the incoming press secretary, did say to me that if I were to do that again I was going to be thrown out of this press conference,” Acosta told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper, speaking on “Inside Politics.”

Spicer’s threat came after Acosta pressed Trump to take a follow-up question after the president-elect assailed CNN for publishing a report Tuesday night on classified documents presented to President Obama and Trump which included allegations that Russian operatives claimed to possess compromising personal and financial information about Trump.

“Mr. President -elect since you are attacking our news organization can you give us a chance,” asked Acosta.

“Not you,” interjected Trump.”[Y]our organization is terrible … I am not going to give you a question … You are fake news.”

“Mr. President-elect that is not appropriate,” Acosta chided towards the end of the exchange.

Speaking later with Tapper and Blitzer, Acosta said he felt obligated to push Trump to answer a follow up question given the attack on CNN.

“I felt it was only fair that if our news organization is going to be attacked that we get a chance to ask a follow up question about what Donald Trump was talking about,” he said.

Trump did later take a question from CNN’s Jeremy Diamond.

(h/t CNN)

Update

Spicer flat out denied that he ever threatened to remove Acosta, again accusing CNN of “false reporting.”

And then, less than an hour later, he appeared on Fox to brag about… threatening to kick Acosta out of the presser for being “disrespectful” to Trump (by asking him a hard question).

Spicer:

“I went over to him. I informed him that, as I said, I thought his behavior was rude, disrespectful, and inappropriate and if it happened again, I would have him removed.”

Trump Packed News Conference With Paid Staffers to Cheer and Jeer as He Bashed Reporters

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When Donald Trump gathered the press at Trump Tower 20 months ago to announce his unlikely candidacy for president, he reportedly paid actors to fill the marble lobby and cheer.

Not much — and everything — has changed since.

On Wednesday morning, when the president-elect once again faced hundreds of reporters from around the globe gathered in his lobby — this time for his first press conference in seven months — Trump filled the room with paid staffers who clapped and cheered as he blasted members of the media as purveyors of “fake news.”

It was Trump’s method of battling back an extraordinary report that U.S. intelligence officials have presented both Trump and President Barack Obama with unverified allegations that Russia has compromising information about the incoming 45th president, including about a reported salacious encounter in a Moscow hotel room.

With three of his grown-up children, Vice President-elect Mike Pence, and members of his senior staff looking on from the sides, Trump framed the anticipated barrage of questions about his connections to the Russians as a referendum, instead, on the untrustworthy media, seated in seven rows of plastic folding chairs in front of him.

The Greek chorus of loyal, paid staffers in the back of the room boosting Trump with their hoots and cheers also served as a reminder, of sorts, of the movement of Trump backers happy to take him at his word and jeer the media as the out-of-touch liars.

“It’s very familiar territory, news conferences,” said Trump, who has been more visible on Twitter than in person since Election Day, as he took the podium. His long absence was the media’s fault, he said, not his. “We stopped giving them because we’re getting quite a bit of inaccurate news,” he said, before calling Buzzfeed, the website that published the full 35-page unverified dossier of allegations against Trump, a “failing pile of garbage.”

“Fake news” became the running theme of the hour-long press conference, which peaked with Trump refusing to take a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta and yelling at him, “I’m not going to give you a question. You’re fake news.” CNN broke the story on Tuesday about the intelligence briefings, which implied Russia could potentially be in a position to blackmail Trump.

Twitter gasped, but his Greek chorus cheered.

“Do you honestly believe that Hillary Clinton would be tougher on Putin than me?” Trump asked at another point. Some staffers in the room responded to the rhetorical question, yelling out, “No!”

And they cheered again when Trump jeered sarcastically at a reporter who asked if he planned to release his tax returns. “Oh gee,” the president-elect said, employing a verbal eye roll, “I’ve never heard that before. The only ones who care about my tax returns are the reporters. I became president.”

The press conference, his first as president-elect, was a dry run of sorts for how Trump can be expected to interact with the press corps in the White House briefing room.

And while it foreshadowed major clashes with news outlets that publish critical stories about Trump — Trump continuing to be Trump — it was also a more formal, less gawdy affair than the press-savvy incoming president has put on in the past.

There was no walk-on music, for instance, as there was during Trump’s presidential announcement. That day, he entered the lower lobby of his Tower via the now-famous escalator with wife Melania at his side and played standards from the musical “Cats” over the sound system.

This time, Trump, without Melania in tow, was delivered to the press via elevator, a little after the scheduled 11 a.m. start time. He called on reporters himself and wrapped up the news conference after 58 minutes when he decided he had had enough — instead of relying on an aide to shut things down, as many politicians do.

Even though he entered the press conference under fire on Wednesday, Trump still appeared more comfortable when he was running the room than when he was standing to the side as a bystander. Trump ceded the podium in the middle of taking questions, so his attorney Sheri Dillon could outline at length the steps Trump is planning to remove himself from the day-to-day operation of his real estate business. But without the spotlight on him, Trump appeared to grow distracted, whispering to his stone-faced daughter, Ivanka, and sipping water from a plastic bottle.

If the cheering staffers created a sense of support for Trump as he denied any collusion with the Russians during the campaign and promised to get Mexico to pay for his wall, the scene outside was a reminder of the other side of the coin. Protesters holding up signs likening the Trump-Pence team to a “fascist regime” lined up across Fifth Avenue from Trump Tower in protest.

With nine days to go until Inauguration Day, the spectacle may be one of the last ones that unfolds on Trump’s home turf in midtown Manhattan, between the Gucci and Bulgari stores. Next up, he will be occupying the people’s home, and confront the press in less familiar, more intimidating surroundings. Despite the fireworks, Trump promised things would settle down before Inauguration Day, which he previewed as “an elegant day.”

“We have a movement,” he said. “It’s a movement like the world has never seen before.”

(h/t Politico)

Trump Shouted Down CNN’s Jim Acosta As ‘Fake News’ Then Took a Question From Breitbart

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One of the stranger moments in Wednesday’s deeply strange Donald Trump press conference came when the president-elect got into a shouting match with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who was trying to ask him a question.

Earlier in the presser — his first one since July — Trump had attacked CNN for disseminating “fake news” because it broke the story that both the sitting president and the president-elect had been briefed on allegations that Russia has “compromising personal and financial information” regarding Trump.

“Since you’re attacking us, can you give us a question?” Acosta asked during a Q&A portion of the presser. Trump replied, “Not you, not you, your organization is terrible.”

“I am not going to give you a question,” the president-elect said. “You are fake news.”

You can watch their full exchange here:

Acosta later said that incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer had threatened to boot him from the press conference if he attempted to ask another question.

During an on-air segment following the press conference, CNN’s Jake Tapper — one of the journalists who wrote the initial report on the allegations — pointed out that his network had not disseminated uncorroborated rumors, as Trump had suggested. Instead, the CNN report acknowledges the existence of the rumors and reports that both Trump and Obama had received briefings on them from the U.S. intelligence community. The specific details of the rumors came from a document Buzzfeed posted in full later Tuesday evening, a move that Tapper described as irresponsible.

“What I suspect we are seeing here is an attempt to discredit legitimate, responsible attempts to report on this incoming administration with irresponsible journalism that hurts us all, and the media going forward should keep that in mind,” said Tapper of Trump’s attempt to conflate the decisions made by Buzzfeed and CNN.

Shortly after he successfully shouted down Acosta, Trump took a question from Breitbart News — a website closely associated with the white nationalist “alt-right,” and an avid promulgator of misleading or inaccurate information that supports hard-right beliefs. Trump’s top adviser, Steve Bannon, is the former chairman of Breitbart.

Here’s the question Trump took from Breitbart: “[With] all the problems that we’ve seen throughout the media over the course of the election, what reforms do you recommend for this industry here?”

(h/t Think Progress)

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