Trump Beats The Press

English: Donald Trump at a press conference announcing David Blaine's latest feat in New York City at the Trump Tower. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With over a week to go before his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump is still fighting the notion that his election in November was anything but legitimate.  That's part of the reason why he held a rare news conference Wednesday at Trump Tower in New York.  It wasn't exactly boring.

Never mind that Trump won the Electoral College vote, but not the popular vote.  There has been evidence for weeks that Russia and its president Vladimir Putin had a lot to do with influencing Trump's win through hacking and other means, and the major intelligence agencies told the president-elect that much.  Putin has denied it and so has Trump, putting him at odds with the intelligence community by claiming it's all politically motivated fake news.

Trump now admitted to the assembled multitude of reporters that yeah, maybe the Russians did do the hacking after all.  But he also lit into reports that a dossier had some damaging information about his personal and business life, pointing the finger at CNN and Buzzfeed for publicizing said dossier that most other news organizations couldn't verify.  This led to a shouting match between Trump and CNN reporter Jim Acosta, who was prevented from asking questions.

The other part of the news conference had to do with how Trump plans to unload his financial dealings before taking office to avoid conflict of interest charges.  Here the proceedings came to a dead stop as Trump turned things over to his attorney, who then described the terms.  Among other things:  Trump's two adult sons would take over the Trump Organization, and the president-elect would have nothing to do with it.  Most of the rest of his assets would go into a trust.  This still doesn't mean Trump won't be making money from this arrangement, however.

Trump concluded by talking in superlatives (as is his wont) about fulfilling some of his campaign promises, such as getting rid of the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with what he thinks is a much better version, building a wall across the Mexican border and keeping jobs in the U.S.A.

Amazingly, Trump's use of Twitter didn't come up.  Nor did his rants directed at Meryl Streep over her critical Golden Globe Awards speech and at Arnold Schwarzenegger for the low TV ratings of "The New Celebrity Apprentice" (for which he's still listed as executive producer).  And not once did he refer to Hillary Clinton as "crooked".  That's progress, I guess.

If the raucous tone of this news conference is any indication, President-elect Trump's plan to handle the media through playing favorites and shutting down all others should tell us that there's not going to be too many more news conferences.  That sure sounds a lot like what Vladimir Putin would do, right?