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| Kellyanne Conway, right, in the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan on Monday. Todd Heisler/The New York Times |
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Donald Trump Cancels New York Times Meeting and Pursues Battles With the Press
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR AND CARL HULSE
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| Good Tuesday morning. |
| President-elect Donald J. Trump woke up on Tuesday to announce on Twitter that he was canceling a planned meeting with the “failing” New York Times, but would move ahead with meetings to form his government “for the next 8 years.” The news media continues to be his foil of choice. |
| Meeting with The Times is abruptly canceled. |
| With reporters and editors set to go, the president-elect announced via Twitter around 6 a.m. that he would not be taking questions from editors and reporters with The New York Times, which were to be mostly on the record, unlike his meeting with television news executives on Monday. |
| “I cancelled today's meeting with the failing @nytimes when the terms and conditions of the meeting were changed at the last moment. Not nice,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. |
| The Times’s senior vice president for communications, Eileen M. Murphy, responded: |
| “We were unaware that the meeting was canceled until we saw the president-elect’s tweet this morning. We did not change the ground rules at all and made no attempt to. They tried to yesterday — asking for only a private meeting and no on-the-record segment, which we refused to agree to. In the end, we concluded with them that we would go back to the original plan of a small off-the-record session and a larger on-the-record session with reporters and columnists.” |
| Italian restaurant chain promises a donation to the Anti-Defamation League. |
| Maggiano’s Little Italy did not want this kind of publicity. |
| After a gathering of neo-Nazis flooded the restaurant in Washington’s upper Northwest corner Friday night, Maggiano’s suddenly was pulled into the debate over hate groups emboldened by Mr. Trump’s election. |
| The restaurant responded on Facebook with an apology and a pledge to donate Friday night’s profits, $10,000, to the Washington chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that fights anti-Semitism. |
| Little pressure is felt to announce appointees. |
| Despite a flurry of activity over the last several days, including more than two dozen interviews with potential cabinet appointees, the pace of announcements from Trump Tower has slowed to a crawl. |
| Aides to Mr. Trump say they are unconcerned and will not be pushed by the expectations of journalists or others to make announcements before they are ready. |
| Mr. Trump was quick to announce his chief of staff and several members of his national security team. But on Monday, Ms. Conway continued to toy with reporters about the timing of any further announcements. |
| “It could come this week,” she said. “It could come today. But we’re not in a rush to publish names just because everybody is looking for the next story, respectfully. You have got to get it right. We know we are ahead of schedule when you compare to previous presidents-elect.” |
| That is true. Mr. Obama did not make any major cabinet announcements until after the Thanksgiving break in 2008. It could be that Mr. Trump keeps his counsel on any other major announcements until then, as well. That would mean that decisions about who will be chosen for secretary of state — Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mitt Romney or someone else — might not come until December. |
| Or they could come sooner. |
