Donald Trump indicates u-turn on climate change, jailing Hillary Clinton

He plans to introduce a resolution next week calling on the president-elect to adopt blind trusts or take equivalent measures to ensure that he complies with the constitution over potential conflicts of interest.

Was this really the same lout who just a few weeks ago sneered that Hillary was “a nasty woman”, who pledged to appoint a special prosecutor to send her up the river?

In the November 22 Times interview, Trump said he had been impressed when he asked Marine General James Mattis, a potential pick for defense secretary, about waterboarding and Mattis replied, “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”.

Donald Trump supporters in full flight before the election.

It was not Trump’s first attempt to distance himself from white supremacists.

He said “a lot of people are coming to” Bannon’s defence, referring to the aggressive pushback the campaign has launched at critics of Bannon, who has earned the support of some Jewish groups on the right, including the Zionist Organisation of America and the Republican Jewish Coalition.

If Trump does abandon his campaign vow to appoint a special prosecutor for Clinton, it will be a reversal of a position he mentioned nearly daily on the campaign trail, when he dubbed his rival “Crooked Hillary”, and crowds at his rallies often chanted: “Lock her up”.

“I don’t want to energize the group, and I disavow the group”, he told the Times. “I don’t want to move back”. “He said: “I’ve never found it to be useful”, he said, adding that Mattis advised building a rapport with detainees: “Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I’ll do better”.

This coming from a person who advocated waterboarding, among others, during the presidential campaign.

As with other issues ranging from abortion to immigration, Trump in recent years has been all over the map on climate change.

President-elect Donald Trump in New Jersey.

“If we come up with this baseline for Trump, we’re going to create a bar – a serious disincentive – for any entrepreneur to run for president”, he said.

Trump bragged that he “helped numerous senators” win, and took a shot New Hampshire Sen.

“I’d assumed that you’d have to set up some type of trust or whatever and you don’t”, he continued – adding that he would “like to do something” to set minds at ease.

He held out assurances that he did not intend to embrace extremist positions in some areas.

Pictures have emerged of white nationalists giving Nazi salutes as they celebrated his election victory.

It was reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s comment to journalist David Frost that by definition, a president’s actions don’t violate the law. “The president can’t have a conflict of interest”.

But he said he’s no longer interested in his businesses and will be passing them on to his children.

■ Trump suggested that under the law, “In theory I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly. I’m very good at this – it’s called construction”, he said.

“We were unaware that the meeting was cancelled until we saw the president elect’s tweet this morning”, Eileen Murphy said. Sympathetically, he said, “She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways”.

“I will tell you honestly, I am not happy that the trans-Pacific agreement now will probably not become reality”, she said.