Trump’s ‘Thank you’ tour gets off to raucous start

It all suggests what many critics have long suspected: that Trump’s attention was riveted by the glitz and glamor of the campaign trail, but that he has no interest in or capacity to doing the hard analytic work of the presidency. It was at least $20,000 to get in the door, Politics Extra learned, and the event showed Republicans are willing to forgive Trump – and vice versa.

The President elect-vowed to bring the country together at a raucous rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, and even reached for unusually lofty rhetoric telling it was not time for America to downsize its dreams. Because that’s exactly what Trump said would happen during the campaign.

He told the thousands that “global is wonderful but, right now, we want to focus on our national community”.

In the crowd, Trump supporters said they were impressed by his deal with Carrier and weren’t overly concerned about his cabinet selections so far, which are dominated by wealthy Wall Street figures and generals, majority white men. Trump’s transition team has restricted press access to the president-elect, setting his administration on a path of secrecy.

But Trump appears acutely aware that the enthusiastic supporters who propelled him to the White House are watching carefully to see if he’ll back away from his pledges to shake up the political system.

“We’re getting credit for having one of the great cabinets ever picked”, Trump said on Fox. “The old rules no longer apply”. He repeated his recent threat that, despite constitutional protections, “if people burn the American flag, there should be consequences”.

Mr Trump also promised to strengthen the armed forces and increase police funding, as well as “construct a great wall at the border” with Mexico.

Future stops on Trump’s victory include North Carolina, .Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida. But when a protester briefly interrupted the night’s ceremonies, Trump turned to the crowd and scoffed: “They don’t know that Hillary lost a couple of weeks ago”. “He’s one of us”. That speech, and the event in OH, gave more evidence that the president-elect “prefers campaigning to governing”, as the Huffington Post’s associate politics editor Marina Fang put it. Trump said. “But the people of Utah were incredible, and we drowned them”. He also said that this wall “will have a door” through which legal immigrants will be able to enter.

Mr Trump rubbed salt into the wound of that failed ambition by using similar language to boast of his wins in traditionally left-leaning mid-western states.

Trump spokesman Jason Miller on Thursday said Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence would talk about “what’s ahead in the days in front of us and the positive change that we’re going to be bringing to the country”.

This week, Trump revealed his picks for leaders at the treasury, commerce and health departments, as well as Mattis to head the Pentagon. “Because he has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives”, Sanders wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece on Thursday. “We have no idea who they are, where they come from, what they’re thinking and we’re going to stop that dead, cold flat”. “Leaving the country is going to be very hard”.

“Thousands and maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of workers woke up today and said, ‘My gosh, he’s not even president yet and he’s figured out how to save 1,000 jobs, ‘” Coats said after meeting Wednesday with Trump in NY.