Trump Remark at News Conference Gives Glimpse Into His Worldview

by · NY Times

News Analysis

An Offhand Remark by Trump Gives a Glimpse Into His Worldview

“The first term, everybody was fighting me,” the president-elect said. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

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President-elect Donald J. Trump at his news conference at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, on Monday. He has enjoyed a steady stream of vanquished opponents and former critics arriving to pay their respects.
Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

By Maggie Haberman

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President-elect Donald J. Trump had been holding forth for about an hour when he gave an unsolicited assessment of the difference between his White House transition eight years ago and now.

“The first term, everybody was fighting me,” he said during his news conference at Mar-a-Lago, his members-only club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

Mr. Trump’s statement was hyperbolic, but not by much.

He has enjoyed a steady stream of vanquished opponents and critics and business leaders who once spurned him arriving to pay respects, seek jobs or simply watch him press “play” on the iPad that he uses to control the music from the patio during the dinner hours.

At least in part, that’s because Mr. Trump has bent the Republican Party to his will. And he has payback on his mind, a fact he made plain on Monday.

Should senators who try to block his appointees face primary challenges, as his allies have promised? If those people are “unreasonable,” then maybe, he said.

Mr. Trump takes a transactional view to almost every international relationship. Since the 1980s, Mr. Trump has talked about other countries “ripping off” the United States, an offshoot of his focus on the need for “fairness.” Monday’s event was no exception to him invoking this theme, as he described Mexico and Canada treating the United States poorly, in his view.

Mr. Trump’s focus on “fairness” was most acute as he talked about the news media and those behind certain polls that he believed had wronged him. One was a famed pollster named Ann Selzer, who published a survey in The Des Moines Register shortly before Election Day presenting a snapshot of a major shift in Iowa that would result in a win by Vice President Kamala Harris. Mr. Trump handily won Iowa.

Mr. Trump said he plans to sue over the poll, which he contended “was fraud and it was election interference.”

He was more specific, and in some ways more well versed, in the status of his various lawsuits against journalists and the Pulitzer Prize board than he was in some aspects of how he plans to address Syria after the fall of the Assad regime.

He went through a litany of the media he believed had wronged him, specifically coverage related to investigations into whether his 2016 campaign had ties to Russians.

“I feel I have to do this,” Mr. Trump said. “I shouldn’t really be the one to do it. Should have been Justice Department or somebody else.”

He added, “It costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press.”

Mr. Trump mused on Monday about why he was being treated differently this time around.

“I don’t know — my personality changed or something,” he said.

In recent weeks, some business leaders, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, have depicted Mr. Trump as a changed man. At The New York Times DealBook conference two weeks ago, Mr. Bezos said Mr. Trump was “calmer” and had “grown in the last eight years.”

In recent days, the president-elect has posted on his website Truth Social an A.I.-generated image mocking Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, for his weight, and an article in support of people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

After six weeks of staying largely out of sight, Mr. Trump has been busy showing people that Washington is what has changed — not the incoming president.

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