Perhaps we should be thankful this week for Donald Trump’s insincerity. In a breathtaking fortnight of flip-flopping, he has reversed many of his most reckless and damaging campaign positions.

The new Trump professes sympathy for people and ideas he disdained during the “vicious” campaign. He now admires President Barack Obama, doesn’t want to harm (let alone lock up) Hillary Clinton, is waffling on climate change, and thinks waterboarding might not work. Maybe he’ll even decide that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a great trade deal. I hope so.

In advertising, this approach is known as “bait and switch.” You hook the prospective buyer with claims that can’t (and in Trump’s case, shouldn’t) be delivered. Then you substitute something more realistic. A scriptural version of a belated conversion (after the wild rumpus is over) is the prayer of the wastrel young St. Augustine: “Lord, make me pure, but not yet.”

Will these changes of position hurt Trump? I doubt it. Moderates will be relieved that he has softened his line on key issues. And true believers probably always knew that Trump’s views were pliable. So much about Trump is like the professional wrestling matches he adores: Everyone knows they’re fake, but fans love the noisy showmanship and phony gut punches all the more.

Some of his reported and rumored Cabinet picks are reassuring, too. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will bring the richness of her Indian-American immigrant experience to the job of U.N. ambassador. Retired Gen. James Mattis would be a fine secretary of defense and the first in memory who keeps Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius for bedside reading. Mitt Romney would be a strong exponent of American interests as secretary of state. With Trump, you’re grateful for every decision and appointment that’s less bad than you feared.

Trump’s interview Tuesday with The New York Times offered a head-spinning summary of the president-elect’s revisionism.

Of Obama, whom he had castigated and sought to undermine for years, he said, “I really liked him a lot” after a White House visit. Of Hillary Clinton, for whom his campaign prescription had been a special prosecutor and imprisonment, he said, “She went through a lot. And suffered greatly in many different ways. And I am not looking to hurt them at all.”

On the Paris agreement to reduce climate change, which he had threatened to tear up, Trump said he now has an “open mind” and sees “some connectivity” between climate change and human activity. About waterboarding, which he had advocated, he suddenly discovered Mattis’ wisdom that “a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers” work better in getting information.

We know what’s going on here: Trump took inflammatory positions during the campaign, which appealed to people’s basest instincts and fears, because he thought they would help him get elected. He’s hardly the first modern politician to discover the utility of lying. Lyndon Johnson was a master at it. Bill Clinton wasn’t bad at it, either, even in front of a grand jury. Hillary Clinton could bend the truth, too, though hardly by Trumpian proportions.

Maybe there’s even something “American” about this form of upbeat dishonesty. River City believed in the ability of “Professor” Harold Hill, “the music man,” to lead a marching band even though he couldn’t read music. Herman Melville, perhaps our greatest novelist, painted a dark picture in “The Confidence Man” of a gambler who boards a riverboat on April Fool’s Day and fleeces his fellow passengers.

What’s jarring here is that Trump’s wildly polarizing rhetoric put the nation through a nightmare campaign. He took raw wounds of race, class and gender and tore at them until they bled. He created the equivalent of a national panic attack. America is a strong country, but it’s a fragile one, too. Trump says he wants to put it back together, but the job will be harder because of the damage he did himself.

We’re watching a new season of the Trump reality TV show — the one in which he realizes that the job he wanted is much bigger than he imagined, and that he needs to heal wounds, rather than keep them festering. The job is bigger than the man, even this one, with his oversized ego.

What should he do? Trump put it just right in his comments to the Times. “We want to bring the country together, because the country is very, very divided.” If he means that, he needs to be a wise, careful steward — two qualities we’d all love to see more of from our next president.</s>NEW YORK — After Ivanka Trump appeared on CBS's "60 Minutes" wearing a $10,800 bracelet from her jewelry line, someone at her company sent photos from the interview to fashion writers to drum up free publicity. A firestorm of criticism erupted over the impropriety of profiting off the presidency, and the company apologized.

If only the bracelet brouhaha was the end of it.

Experts on government ethics are warning President-elect Donald Trump that he'll never shake suspicions of a clash between his private interests and the public good if he doesn't sell off his vast holdings, which include roughly 500 companies in more than a dozen countries. They say just the appearance of conflicts is likely to tie up the new administration in investigations, lawsuits and squabbles, stoked perhaps by angry Oval Office tweets.

"People are itching to sue Donald Trump and stick him under oath," said Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush.

In an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday, Trump insisted that the "law's totally on my side," and ethics experts agree that federal conflicts of interest rules largely exempt the president from running his businesses the way he pleases while in office. His company, The Trump Organization, had no comment on the conflicts issue, other than a statement reiterating its plans to transfer control of the company to three of the president-elect's adult children.

Painter doesn't think that goes far enough. In a letter to Trump last week, he joined watchdog groups and ethics lawyers from both Democratic and Republican administrations in predicting "rampant, inescapable" conflicts that will engulf the new administration if the president-elect does not liquidate his business holdings.

A look at five areas where conflicts may arise:

For use of the government-owned Old Post Office for his new Washington hotel, Trump agreed on annual rent to the government in a contract that was signed more than three years ago.

So what possibly could be the problem now?

Plenty, according to Steven Schooner, a professor of government procurement law at George Washington University who has studied contract. In addition to base rent, the president-elect agreed to additional annual payments based on various financial measures of how well the hotel is doing. Schooner says such payments typically require drawn out negotiations each year.

"How can anyone expect a government employee to negotiate with the Trump family at arm's length and treat the Trump family like any other contractor?" Schooner asks.

Schooner thinks Trump should terminate the contract because, even if the Trump family acts honorably, the appearance a conflict will spread doubt throughout the contracting system. Federal rules prohibit government employees and elected officials from striking contracting deals with the government for just this reason, though the president is exempted.

"The U.S. government pays over $400 billion in contracts a year," Schooner says. "Why should other contractors have to follow the rule if the President of the United States doesn't have to?"

As president, Trump will have the authority to appoint a new head to the General Services Administration, the federal agency that signed the lease with Trump and will negotiate the rent each year.

Business at the hotel could get a lift if foreign dignitaries decide to stay at the new hotel to curry favor with the new president.

In addition to the Washington hotel, Trump Organization leases land from some local governments, including for a golf course in New York City and one in Florida.

Trump's extensive operations abroad raise the possibility that his foreign policy could be shaped by his business interests, and vice versa. Trump has struck real estate deals in South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Uruguay, Panama, India and Turkey, among other countries.

In June, Turkish media reported that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for Trump's name to be removed from the Trump Towers in Istanbul because of what Erdogan characterized as anti-Muslim comments by the candidate. A NATO member, Turkey is a key ally in fighting the Islamic State group in Syria.

In India, the newspaper Economic Times reported that Trump held a meeting in New York a week after his election with business partners who put up the Trump Towers Pune in the western part of the country. The president-elect also has a Trump-branded residential tower in nearly Mumbai with another company.

Kenneth Gross, head of political law at the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, says Trump's business ties will raise suspicions that he is getting special deals abroad because he is president, and that this runs the risk of violating the Emolument Clause. That is a section of the U.S. Constitution that forbids public officials from receiving gifts from foreign governments and foreign-controlled companies without the consent of Congress.

"He can't avoid conflicts," said Gross, "unless he sells his assets."

One of Trump's biggest lenders is Deutsche Bank, a German giant in settlement negotiations with the Department of Justice on its role in the mortgage blowup that triggered the 2008 financial crisis. The hit to Deutsche could be substantial, with the government reportedly demanding $14 billion.

Will a Justice Department under Trump go easy on the bank? It's not clear anyone will know. Trump will nominate the head of that agency, too.

One possible response is for Trump to makes sure the Deutsche case is handled by career civil servants at Justice, and any appointee like the Attorney General is recused. A career civil servant doesn't have to worry about being fired if he goes against Trump's wishes, but may still worry about displeasing his bosses connected to the president.

More than 300 positions at Justice are currently held by presidential appointees.

The odds that the IRS will rule against Trump may be no different than before he was elected, but it's difficult to know for sure.

Trump has cited a long running audit by the Internal Revenue Service in refusing to release his tax returns. If he is under scrutiny, it's not surprising. In his Oct. 9 debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump confirmed he used a $916 million loss in 1995 to avoid paying federal taxes for years.

The president nominates the commissioner of the IRS who, assuming the Senate approves, serves for five years.

Trump will also get to make appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, which rules on labor disputes. In July, the board ruled against Trump in a case involving workers trying to unionize at the Trump Hotel Las Vegas. The Trump Organization lists six other hotels in the U.S. on its website.

Trump said Friday that he agreed to pay $25 million to settle three lawsuits alleging fraud at his Trump University so he could focus on his preparing for his presidency. But this could also bring problems, as Trump himself has acknowledged previously.

"When you start settling cases, you know what happens?" the president-elect said earlier this year. "Everybody sues you because you get known as a settler."

Painter, the ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, predicts the political divide in Washington is going to make things worse.

"The plaintiff's lawyers are going to get in there because they can get a good settlement, and Trump's political enemies are going to egg it on," says Painter. "You put that all together and you're going to have a lot of potential for litigation."

Painter says Trump should sell his ownership stakes to minimize the danger the new president gets distracted by lawsuits. He adds, though, that this is just partial fix. The famously litigious Trump already is facing numerous lawsuits.

Asked to sum up his view on Trump's situation, Painter replies, "A mess, a mess."</s>Donald Trump's America: Here There Is No Why

In the aftermath of the election, a lot of think pieces have been written about the need to empathize with Trump’s voters more. Commentators chide the elitist liberals for not understanding Trump voters’ economic anxiety, which is manifesting all over the country now in the form of spray-painted swastikas sprouting up on public property.

If you’re looking for something to blame for this calamity, you can point your finger at institutional racism or the confounding Electoral College. If you need a human face to direct your rage at, you can consider my family, because they’re partially to blame, too.

During this election, many evangelicals’ hatred of Hillary Clinton was more powerful than their desire to protect the country from a dangerous demagogue. In spite of all Trump’s hateful rhetoric, their irrational fear of change proved to be a stone too heavy to move.

These are, I’m sad to say, my people. Growing up my sister and I were forced to go to Sunday school every week. Awana. Bible camp. The whole works.

About a week before the election, my mom told me that she could not support Hillary Clinton due to her stance on abortion. When I asked her how many abortions she thinks Donald Trump has paid for over the years, she changed the subject.

“Did you know that Hillary had people killed in Arkansas? And in Benghazi too. It’s true...”

The conversation ended with the assertion that there are sleeper cells of radical Islamic extremists in every Congressional district who are just waiting for some kind of signal to trigger an apocalyptic terrorist attack. I love my mother, but at times like these I really, really don’t like her. She voted for Trump and thinks he’s going to do his best, despite some misgivings about his temperament.

Unlike my mom, my stepfather is not a particularly religious person. He’s an electrical engineer with an excellent-paying job and zero economic anxiety. I’ve always found him to be an even-tempered, reasonable kind of man. He’s never displayed any outward signs of bigotry, racism, sexism or xenophobia. A few days before the election he commented on the unseasonably warm weather. He said global warming must be a real thing.

In response I shared an anecdote about Donald Trump’s ludicrous claim that climate change was a hoax started by the Chinese. We shared a good laugh about that one. Then he went out and voted for Trump anyway.

In Primo Levi’s 1958 memoir about his time in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, he tells a story about breaking off an icicle to slake his thirst. When a guard takes it away he asked why. The guard replied Hier ist kein warum. Here there is no why.

Understanding why so many decent Americans cast aside their common sense and morality and voted for Trump is irrelevant. Do you really need to know why a meteor is heading for Earth to wipe us all out? No. Yet this unfortunate instinct to try to understand why extends to Democratic leadership.

A few prominent Democrats in the Senate are already suggesting that they're willing to "work with" Trump on some issues. Two weeks ago, Chuck Schumer said there are no plans to use the filibuster, which is their last line of defense with minorities in both houses.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren seem to think that Trump's economic populism message may have been sincere and at the very least he should be given a chance. This is exactly the wrong way to handle it and all too typical from a party that's naive about the nature of the enemy that it's facing.

The impulse to meet Republicans in the middle is what makes progressives better people on a fundamental level. It’s also a double-edged sword that they consistently use against us. The thing is that Republicans do not care about consensus. They do not care about governance. Based on their non-reaction to the Russians hacking the election they don’t even care about the sovereignty of the United States. Winning takes precedence over everything else.

Instead of trying to figure out why so many of their countrymen voted for this deranged lunatic, progressives need to focus their energy on stopping his agenda at all costs.

What can be done?

It’s tempting to wallow in depression and despair (I did for two full days after the election) but we are not powerless. There may be some hope that a few Republicans in the Senate will not give Trump a rubber stamp for his destructive policies. Rand Paul and Lindsay Graham never got on board the Trump train and are making noises about resisting his worst impulses. But relying on “moderate” Republicans to do the right thing is about the most asinine approach that I can think of. Remember these people have held a Supreme Court seat open for over ten months because they thought the next President should make the nomination (as long as it wasn’t Hillary Clinton.)

Republicans are going to take the icicle away because they can. Because defeating the infidel Democrats is more important to them than running the country. Don’t ask why. Say no. Resist.

Here a few things that you can do to help.

Resistance must begin at the local level, where even in liberal Washington state you can find burgeoning brownshirts who are already making calls to subvert our constitutional rights.

State Senator Doug Ericksen is proposing class C felony charges for non-violent protesters and their so-called accomplices. Call your local officials and make sure his bill gets shot down. Then you can reach Mr. Ericksen himself at doug@senatorericksen.com or 360-786-7682.

On a national level, there are some who are holding out hope that Mr. Trump can be prevented from taking the oath of office by pressuring Electoral College members to honor the popular vote and cast Trump aside. Faithless electors are a long shot but if Trump continues to bungle the transition perhaps enough of them can be persuaded that his Presidency represents a genuine threat to our nation. For what it’s worth, you can sign a petition here.

If these feel like futile suggestions you’re not alone in that sentiment.

Our only true hope lies in ruthless vigilance once Trump is in the Oval Office. Already he is using his influence to pressure international leaders to stay at Trump hotels. The corruption and profiteering to come out of the West Wing over the next four years will be unprecedented.

Trump would not have been “elected” (Hillary is winning the popular vote by 2 million) without billions of dollars in free advertising thanks to the shamelessness of 24-hour cable news channels. In their pursuit of ratings and clicks the traditional media completely failed to warn the American people of the threat Trump represents to the Republic. Hoping that they’ll suddenly remember their journalistic integrity now and bite that hand that feeds is foolish.

That makes quality, fearless print journalism more important than ever. In the run-up to “winning” the election, Trump demonized the media and often worked his crowds into a fever pitch while antagonizing the traveling press corps.

Since his win, Trump has spent an inordinate amount of time complaining about the New York Times’ coverage of him during the campaign. Their subscriptions are now skyrocketing. This is the rebound effect.

Make no mistake: a Trump administration will be fundamentally hostile to the First Amendment and the fourth estate in particular. Trump’s first autocratic assault will come against the freedom of the press. The fate of the nation now rests in the hands of its finest investigative reporters.

Mainstream papers like the Times and the Washington Post may have been derelict in their duties, but there are still many great outlets doing important work like The Stranger, the Nation and Mother Jones. Subscribe. Donate. Share. Read. Resist.

Tim Weaver covers the Seahawks for USA Today and film for Men’s Philosophy. You can find him on Twitter @Timweaver84.</s>A group of computer scientists and election attorneys are urging Democrat Hillary Clinton to call for a recount in three swing states where President-elect Donald Trump won, New York Magazine reported Tuesday.

The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, said they had found evidence indicating the results in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan may have been manipulated or hacked. The group has not gone on record with their findings yet and is lobbying in private for Clinton to demand a recount.

The findings do not prove that the results in the three states were hacked or manipulated but the group said it believes the evidence merits a recount. The activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta and campaign General Counsel Marc Elias last week to inform them of the findings, urging them to take action, the report said.

The findings indicated that in Wisconsin, Clinton won 7 percent fewer votes in counties that used electronic-voting machines when compared to those that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Statistical analysis showed that the Democrat may have been denied of nearly 30,000 votes. Clinton lost the state to Trump by 27,000 votes.

Currently, Trump has 290 Electoral College votes and Clinton 232. Michigan’s 16 votes haven’t been allocated yet as the race there is still too close to call. In order for Clinton to win the electoral college votes, the results in both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania must be overturned and the former secretary of state will also have to win Michigan’s 16 votes.

At least six Electoral College voters have reportedly said they will not be voting for Trump in spite of the real estate mogul winning their states.

Deadlines for filing for a recount are fast approaching too. In Wisconsin, the deadline for filing for a recount is Friday. The deadline in Pennsylvania is Monday and in Michigan, it’s next Wednesday. The Clinton campaign is yet to comment on the matter.

While she lost in the Electoral College, Clinton secured 1.75 million more popular votes than Trump. As of Tuesday morning, Clinton had tallied 63,757,077 votes to Trump’s 62,004,178. Clinton has 48 percent support nationwide while Trump is at 46.7 percent.
• 6 Electoral College Members Sign Up To Block Trump From Winning
• Clinton Has Plurality, Not Majority, Of Popular Vote</s>Donald Trump did it all wrong. His campaign launch was a disaster of off-the-cuff race-baiting and back-of-the-napkin plans for a Mexican border wall. He didn’t spend real time on the ground in Iowa or New Hampshire, eating breakfasts at greasy spoons or attending coffee klatches in church basements. He invested hardly any money in TV ads, or hiring staff, or opening offices. He insulted his Republican opponents, picking on them for their looks, or stature, spouses and mothers. And he refused to pledge loyalty to the party he was hoping to lead, attacking its elder statesmen as cowards and failures.

As the months went on, the 70-year-old’s errors became more egregious. He advanced loony conspiracy theories as fact, and got caught out lying, often several times a day. He flubbed interviews and was unable to provide even the most basic of details for his promises and policies. He praised tyrants for their “toughness,” cozied up to foreign dictators and voiced his support for torture, assassinations and other war crimes. He was a billionaire who pledged to make America a fairer place as he flew around on his fleet of private jets, refusing to make public his tax returns.

Trump committed electoral suicide by vilifying the mainstream media as corrupt and dishonest, while playing footsie with “alt-right” Internet trolls and their cesspools of racism and anti-Semitism. When a former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan endorsed his candidacy, it took him three whole days to disavow him. At the Republican convention, his would-be first lady, Melania, plagiarized her address to the nation, claiming Michelle Obama’s words as her own. Meanwhile Trump demonstrated his own hubris by trying to pass off Scott Baio as a celebrity.

Trump said things that no other major party nominee had ever said before—lots of things. He denounced longtime American allies as freeloaders, and claimed that climate change was all a Chinese hoax. He scapegoated Muslims as terrorists, denigrated African-American communities as “hell holes,” and got caught bragging about sexually assaulting women in an old “hot mic” tape. When 10 women came forward with claims that he had groped them in the past, he suggested some were too ugly to warrant his attention, and threatened legal action: “All of these liars will be sued when the election is over.” He boasted about the size of his genitals, live on TV. He even picked a fight with the Pope. Academics and pundits debated about whether he should be labelled a fascist, or if he might be suffering from mental illness. He fired two campaign managers over the course of a summer. (The first just couldn’t get along with Trump’s kids. The second, it was revealed, had taken millions in payments from a Kremlin-backed puppet regime in Ukraine.)

Trump’s recklessness knew no bounds. He attacked the grieving family of a fallen U.S. soldier. He dubbed his Democratic opponent “Crooked Hillary” and promised to appoint a special prosecutor to put her in jail. He begged for Russian or Chinese hackers to steal his country’s secrets and interfere in its affairs. And when it seemed certain that he would lose, Trump told his followers that the election was “rigged” and urged them to stand watch at the polls in certain “areas.” Then he refused to say whether he would actually accept the outcome if things didn’t go his way. “I’ll keep you all in suspense,” was his taunting line.

It was the phoniest, crassest, most racist and misogynistic campaign in modern American history. It was surpassed in ineptitude only by the one run by the Democrats and Hillary Clinton. Despite it all—or more accurately, because of it all—Donald J. Trump won. The 45th president of the United States will be wholly untested, unqualified, and temperamentally unfit for the world’s most important job. But he will have a Y chromosome.

The debate leading up to his Jan. 20, 2017, inauguration (and presumably for the four years that follow) will be whether the jackass can change his spots. Trump talked about taming his tongue and Twitter account during the campaign and becoming more “presidential,” yet the pivot never came. On election night he promised to be a leader “for all of Americans.” Yet post-victory, the early indications gave little cause for optimism. Trump renewed his fight with the media. He named alt-right guru Steve Bannon as his “chief strategist and counsellor,” an appointment applauded by white nationalists and denounced by pretty much everyone else. He asked for top-secret security clearances for his adult children. There were reports that Trump’s transition team were having difficulty convincing him to crack the briefing books. And a story—possibly apocryphal—that the president-elect’s closest advisers were unaware that they would have to hire an entirely new political staff for the White House once Barack Obama left town.

America is not united. Trump won the electoral college, but lost the popular vote to Clinton, in an election where just 58 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot. There was a spike in hate crimes and reports of racial harassment. His victory was greeted with mass protests in the streets.

Donald Trump did everything wrong. But it was America that made the mistake. Now the question is how the rest of the world will end up paying for it.</s>NEW YORK—After Ivanka Trump appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes wearing a $10,800 bracelet from her jewelry line, someone at her company sent photos from the interview to fashion writers to drum up free publicity. A firestorm of criticism erupted over the impropriety of profiting off the presidency, and the company apologized.

If only the bracelet brouhaha was the end of it.

Experts on government ethics are warning President-elect Donald J. Trump that he’ll never shake suspicions of a clash between his private interests and the public good if he doesn’t sell off his vast holdings, which include roughly 500 companies in more than a dozen countries.

They say just the appearance of conflicts is likely to tie up the new administration in investigations, lawsuits and squabbles, stoked perhaps by angry Oval Office tweets.

“People are itching to sue Donald Trump and stick him under oath,” said Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush.

In an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday, Trump insisted that the “law’s totally on my side,” and ethics experts agree that federal conflicts of interest rules don’t apply to the president so he can run his business pretty much the way he pleases while in office.

His company, The Trump Organization, had no comment on the conflicts issue, other than a statement reiterating its plans to transfer control of the company to three of the president-elect’s adult children.

Painter doesn’t think that goes far enough. In a letter to Trump last week, he joined watchdog groups and ethics lawyers from both Democratic and Republican administrations in predicting “rampant, inescapable” conflicts that will engulf the new administration if the president-elect does not liquidate his business holdings.

A look at five areas where conflicts may arise:

For use of the government-owned Old Post Office for his new Washington hotel, Trump agreed on annual rent to the government in a contract that was signed more than three years ago.

So what possibly could be the problem now?

Plenty, according to Steven Schooner, a professor of government procurement law at George Washington University who has studied the contract.

In addition to base rent, the president-elect agreed to additional annual payments based on various financial measures of how well the hotel is doing. Schooner says such payments typically require drawn-out negotiations each year.

“How can anyone expect a government employee to negotiate with the Trump family at arm’s length and treat the Trump family like any other contractor?” Schooner asks. Schooner thinks Trump should terminate the contract because, even if the Trump family acts honorably, the appearance of a conflict will spread doubt throughout the contracting system.

Federal rules prohibit government employees and elected officials from striking contracting deals with the government for just this reason, though the president is exempted.

“The US government pays over $400 billion in contracts a year,” Schooner says. “Why should other contractors have to follow the rule if the President of the United States doesn’t have to?”

As president, Trump will have the authority to appoint a new head to the General Services Administration, the federal agency that signed the lease with Trump and will negotiate the rent each year.

Business at the hotel could get a lift if foreign dignitaries decide to stay at the new hotel to curry favor with the new president.

In addition to the Washington hotel, Trump Organization leases land from some local governments, including for a golf course in New York City and one in Florida.

Trump’s extensive operations abroad raise the possibility that his foreign policy could be shaped by his business interests, and vice versa. Trump has struck real-estate deals in South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Uruguay, Panama, India and Turkey, among other countries.

In June Turkish media reported that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for Trump’s name to be removed from the Trump Towers in Istanbul because of what Erdogan characterized as anti-Muslim comments by the candidate. A North Atlantic Treaty Organization member, Turkey is a key ally in fighting the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria.

In India, the newspaper Economic Times reported that Trump held a meeting in New York a week after his election with business partners who put up the Trump Towers Pune in the western part of the country. The president-elect also has a Trump-branded residential tower in nearly Mumbai with another company.

Kenneth Gross, head of political law at the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, says Trump’s business ties will raise suspicions that he is getting special deals abroad because he is president, and that this runs the risk of violating the Emolument Clause. That is a section of the US Constitution that forbids public officials from receiving gifts from foreign governments and foreign-controlled companies without the consent of Congress.

“He can’t avoid conflicts,” said Gross, “unless he sells his assets.”

One of Trump’s biggest lenders is Deutsche Bank, a German giant in settlement negotiations with the Department of Justice on its role in the mortgage blowup that triggered the 2008 financial crisis. The hit to Deutsche could be substantial, with the government reportedly demanding $14 billion.

Will a Justice Department under Trump go easy on the bank? It’s not clear anyone will know. Trump will nominate the head of that agency, too. One possible response is for Trump to make sure the Deutsche case is handled by career civil servants at Justice, and any appointee, like the Attorney General, is recused. A career civil servant doesn’t have to worry about being fired if he goes against Trump’s wishes, but may still worry about displeasing bosses connected to the president.

More than 300 positions at Justice are currently held by presidential appointees.

The odds that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will rule against Trump may be no different than before he was elected, but it’s difficult to know for sure.

Trump has cited a long-running audit by the IRS in refusing to release his tax returns. If he is under scrutiny, it’s not surprising. In his October 9 debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump confirmed he used a $916-million loss in 1995 to avoid paying federal taxes for years.

The president nominates the commissioner of the IRS who, assuming the Senate approves, serves for five years.

Trump will also get to make appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, which rules on labor disputes. In July the board ruled against Trump in a case involving workers trying to unionize at the Trump Hotel Las Vegas. The Trump Organization lists six other hotels in the US on its web site.

Trump said on Friday that he agreed to pay $25 million to settle three lawsuits alleging fraud at his Trump University so he could focus on preparing for his presidency. But this could also bring problems, as Trump himself has acknowledged previously.

“When you start settling cases, you know what happens?” the president-elect said earlier this year. “Everybody sues you because you get known as a settler.”

Painter, the ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, predicts the political divide in Washington is going to make things worse. AP

“The plaintiff’s lawyers are going to get in there because they can get a good settlement, and Trump’s political enemies are going to egg it on,” says Painter. “You put that all together and you’re going to have a lot of potential for litigation.”

Painter says Trump should sell his ownership stakes to minimize the danger the new president gets distracted by lawsuits. He adds, though, that this is just a partial fix. The famously litigious Trump already is facing numerous lawsuits.

Asked to sum up his view on Trump’s situation, Painter replies, “A mess, a mess.”</s>Hillary Clinton is being urged by expert computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Trump, publication New York has reported.

Persuasive evidence has reportedly been found that shows results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.

The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Centre for Computer Security and Society, is lobbying Clinton’s team privately before going on the record about their findings.

Their findings apparently show a trend of Clinton performing worse in counties that relied on electronic voting machines compared to paper ballots and optical scanners.

Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30 000 votes. She lost Wisconsin by 27 000.

The vote in Michigan has still not been called as the results were too close – and the 16 electoral votes in the state have not been given to Trump or Clinton.

Clinton would need to win Michigan and overturn the results in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to win the electoral college.

Time is of the essence if Clinton is to pursue challenging the results. The deadline in Wisconsin to file for a recount is Friday; in Pennsylvania, it’s Monday; and Michigan is next Wednesday.

Both Trump and Clinton have declined to respond to questions regarding the report, CNN says.

Meanwhile, Trump “doesn’t wish to pursue” further investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email practices, a top advisor said on Tuesday, a turnaround from all the campaign rallies when Trump roused supporters to chants of “lock her up.”

“I think Hillary Clinton still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don’t find her to be honest or trustworthy, but if Donald Trump can help her heal then perhaps that’s a good thing,” Kellyanne Conway said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”.

That comes after months of Trump nicknaming his Democratic rival “Crooked Hillary,” questioning whether the Clinton Foundation is a pay-for-play scheme and raging against the Justice Department for refusing to prosecute her for blending private and official business on her homebrew email server. He told her face-to-face at a presidential debate that if he won the presidency, she’d “be in jail.”

Conway’s comments were striking because Justice Department investigations are historically conducted without the influence or input of the White House. Presidents do not dictate decisions on which criminal investigations are pursued or their outcome.

The disparity between Trump’s taunts on the campaign trail and his approach now, Conway suggested, is part of a purposeful shift away from at least the tone, if not the substance, of his past rhetoric.

“I think he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States and things that sound like the campaign aren’t among them,” she said.

Trump himself has appeared to waver on whether he would want to seek further probes into possible wrongdoing by the Clintons.

“I’m going to think about it,” he said in a 60 Minutes interview, his first sit-down interview after the November 8 election. “I feel that I want to focus on jobs, I want to focus on health care, I want to focus on the border and immigration and doing a really great immigration bill. We want to have a great immigration bill. And I want to focus on – all of these other things that we’ve been talking about.”

Trump said in that interview that Clinton “did some bad things,” but ultimately the Clintons are “good people” and “I don’t want to hurt them.”

Conway’s comments came as Trump abruptly cancelled a meeting with The New York Times on Tuesday, accusing the organisation of changing the conditions for the session “at the last moment.” The newspaper denied this and said Trump’s aides tried to change the rules. But Hope Hicks, speaking for Trump, said later the meeting was back on and he’d be “going to The New York Times” later on Tuesday.

Trump met privately on Monday with representatives of the television networks.

The president-elect heralded “more great meetings” in his Manhattan tower as he continues shaping his administration before heading to Florida for Thanksgiving on Tuesday. — AFP</s>Donald Trump is the new politician with unbridled conviction: he never apologises, never backs down. He’s also the newest member of the political establishment with the most unrestrained presence on Twitter, a combination which becomes increasingly problematic if you are the next man lined up to lead the country.

Mr Trump’s tweets are now heavily scrutinised, becoming the standard against which his speeches, remarks and those delivered by his family are compared against for instances of glaring irony. Melania Trump’s promise to tackle social media bullying is a memorable case in point.

A number have come back to haunt him. The President-elect was beaten in the popular vote by Hillary Clinton, who is ahead by more than two million votes, but won thanks to the 290 electoral votes he amassed. This victory came after Mr Trump branded the electoral college “a disaster for democracy“ in a tweet three years before.

The billionaire business magnate hinted he might consider running for the White House on a number of occasions, hints that were widely ridiculed by the likes of President Obama, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, a host of comedians and the public, including one woman who implored him not to run in 2014. This tweet was shared from his account with commentary added on the end that holds more significance now than most would have ever thought possible.

Off-the-cuff remarks are proving illuminating in understanding the 70-year-old and the motivations behind his political ambitions. His interview with The New York Times on Tuesday demonstrated this when an unusually sanguine Mr Trump spoke about his aims for the future after a lengthy speech about win, win, winning, where he declared: “To me more important is taking care of the people that really have proven to be, to love Donald Trump, as opposed to the political people.”</s>Hillary Clinton Now Leading Donald Trump By More Than Two Million Votes

Hillary Clinton's margin in the popular vote against President-elect Donald Trump has surpassed 2 million, furthering the record for a candidate who lost in the Electoral College. Thanks to votes still being counted in California and other western areas, Clinton's vote advantage hit the 2 million mark on Wednesday morning, according to Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. As of mid-day Wednesday, Wasserman's spread sheet had Clinton at 64,225,863 votes to Trump's 62,210,612.

Donald Trump told the New York Times yesterday the same thing George W. Bush told anyone who would listen in 2000: He could've won the popular vote if he'd wanted to win the popular vote...

We had a great victory. I think it would have been easier because I see every once in awhile somebody says, ‘Well, the popular vote.’ Well, the popular vote would have been a lot easier, but it’s a whole different campaign. I would have been in California, I would have been in Texas, Florida and New York, and we wouldn’t have gone anywhere else. Which is, I mean I’d rather do the popular vote from the standpoint — I’d think we’d do actually as well or better... I think the popular vote would have been easier in a true sense because you’d go to a few places. I think that’s the genius of the Electoral College. I was never a fan of the Electoral College until now.

Sure, Donald. You could've won California—a state you lost by 30+ points—if you'd just had a few more rallies there.

And saying Trump was no fan of the Electoral College until now is an understatement. Here's what Trump tweeted out in 2012 when it looked like Obama might lose the popular vote to Romney but win the electoral college:

Don't say I didn't warn you. And here's what Democrats can do about the Electoral College.</s>Washington (CNN) President-elect Donald Trump is sounding a different tune as he prepares to take on the mantle of the presidency.

The brash businessman has already begun to step away from some of his rhetoric and promises he made during the presidential campaign -- ranging from how he'll treat Hillary Clinton to what he can accomplish with Congress.

Here's Donald Trump then and now.

Trump repeatedly bashed Clinton's use of a private email server during his campaign, ticking down a list of alleged misconduct and repeatedly arguing that Clinton should be behind bars as his supporters erupted in "Lock her up!" chants.

Trump then: "If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we're going to have a special prosecutor," "If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we're going to have a special prosecutor," he said at the second presidential debate last month . He added that she'd be "in jail" if he were president.

Trump now: "I want to move forward, I don't want to move back. And I don't want to hurt the Clintons. I really don't. She went through a lot. And suffered greatly in many different ways. And I am not looking to hurt them at all," Trump "I want to move forward, I don't want to move back. And I don't want to hurt the Clintons. I really don't. She went through a lot. And suffered greatly in many different ways. And I am not looking to hurt them at all," Trump told The New York Times on Tuesday. "It's just not something that I feel very strongly about."

Donald Trump called climate change a "hoax" invented by the Chinese before launching his presidential campaign

And in May, he said he would "cancel" the Paris climate change accord.

Trump now: "I have an open mind to it," he told the Times on the Paris deal. "We're going to look very carefully. I have a very open mind."

Asked about the scientific consensus on a connection between human activity and climate change, he added: "I think there is some connectivity. There is some, something. It depends on how much. It also depends on how much it's going to cost our companies."

One of Trump's core campaign promises was his pledge to "repeal and replace" Obamacare, which he repeatedly dubbed a "disaster" during the campaign. Now, it seems like things aren't so clear cut.

Trump then: "Real change begins with immediately repealing and replacing Obamacare," he said on the eve of the election.

"I like those very much," he said of those provisions.

Trump repeatedly argued the US should take a more aggressive approach to combating terrorism, including bringing back the use of the controversial torture tactic known as waterboarding.

Trump then: "I would bring back waterboarding and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding," he said in a GOP debate February 6. And even in the last week of his presidential campaign, Trump bemoaned criticism of waterboarding, saying "we have to be pretty vicious."

Trump now: He now seems to be changing his mind after talking with retired Gen. James Mattis, a leading candidate to become secretary of defense.

"(Mattis) said -- I was surprised -- he said, 'I've never found it to be useful.' He said, 'I've always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture.' And I was very impressed by that answer," Trump told the Times.

"Look, we have people that are chopping off heads and drowning people in steel cages and we're not allowed to waterboard. But I'll tell you what, I was impressed by that answer. It certainly does not -- it's not going to make the kind of a difference that maybe a lot of people think. If it's so important to the American people, I would go for it. I would be guided by that."

Trump has been meeting with a slew of his former critics as he looks to build his administration. And he's even making room for those critics in his administration.

Trump then: "The people of South Carolina are embarrassed by Nikki Haley!" he tweeted in March.

On the New York Times

The newspaper was one of Trump's prime targets for ridicule and attack during his campaign rallies.

Trump then: "No media is more corrupt than the failing New York Times."

Trump now: "I will say, The Times is, it's a great, great American jewel. A world jewel."
Hillary Clinton's lead in the popular vote over Donald Trump rises above 2 million.