Amid strains, Trump says only he knows finalists for Cabinet

President-elect Donald Trump hadn’t been seen in public for days when he walked into New York’s 21 Club to applause from fellow diners.

Starting early Wednesday morning, Trump once again took to Twitter to reject the reports of chaos and infighting, saying in a tweetstorm that the process of selecting members of his future Cabinet was going “so smoothly”.

A speech he gave last month to the Heritage Foundation illustrated one area where he might have disagreed with Trump, who favors conciliation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, “The Russians are certainly on the march”, Rogers said.

Now, as his transition team asserts itself, an all-out repeal of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law – Trump called it a “disaster” and a “disgrace” – seems unlikely.

“When you’re doing a transition that is trying to push the kind of change that Mr. Trump wants to be doing, it’s going to be even harder”, Hoekstra, a former House Intelligence Committee chairman, said.

But transition spokesman Jason Miller also said there’s no “formal pool structure” right now to abide by.

The report also said the Trump team was looking at how Homeland Security “could move rapidly on border wall construction without approval from Congress by reappropriating existing funds in the current budget”.

Christie had been chairman of the transition leading up to the election and had built out a robust team of staff dedicated to agency engagement, policy development and developing and vetting a cabinet. She says she hopes to work with Trump on school choice and suggests there are “positive signs” the president-elect will govern differently than he campaigned.

As president, his associates said, Trump will seek rather than shun competing advice.

In a tweet on Tuesday night Trump had said he was “the only one who knows who the finalists are” for appointed positions in his administration, which takes over on January 20.

Japan’s leader will likely seek reassurances that President-elect Donald Trump remains committed to the U.S. -Japan security alliance when the two meet in NY on Thursday. But they were also still reeling from internal party divides; across the Capitol, House Democrats postponed their leadership elections until after Thanksgiving.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, “We are not planning on erecting a deportation force”.

Trump took out his frustrations over media accounts in The New York Times, angrily tweeting Wednesday morning about the paper’s coverage of his transition.

Last week the president-elect ditched the head of the team, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who is mired in political scandal, and replaced him with Pence.

White House spokeswoman Brandi Hoffine said the minimum paperwork was finished Thursday, meaning agencies could start providing briefings and written materials to Trump’s team.

Pence met Wednesday with Biden at the Naval Observatory, the vice presidential residence in leafy northwest Washington, D.C. Biden expressed confidence that by Trump’s January 20 inauguration, “everything will be in good hands”. Ingraham, a fiery critic of the news media who worked on domestic policy for the Reagan White House, has told Trump aides that she would be interested in a number of posts.

Pence and transition executive director Rick Dearborn have ordered the removal of all lobbyists from the team, NBC News said it had learned.

Word has gone out to those interested in serving in the Trump administration that the top positions will nearly surely go to those who backed him in the campaign. Cohen opposed Trump during the campaign, but in recent days, he said those who feel duty-bound to work in a Trump administration should do so. They declined to provide details about how many lobbyists had been fired or to name them, but said it was a priority.

A NY real estate baron like his father-in-law, Kushner played a central role in the campaign, emerging as the reliable and reasonable go-to man at Trump Tower, especially when the nominee looked determined to destroy himself.

Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, also visited the Trump Tower and called the billionaire businessman “a true friend of Israel”.