Washington: There's the presidency and then there are the President-elect's priorities.
And in the past few days they seem to revolve mainly around settling scores with media heavies - executives, anchors and reporters.
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After days spent hammering the cast of the Broadway cult sensation Hamilton for upbraiding Vice-President-elect Mike Pence Trump and then getting stuck into Saturday Night Live for Alec Baldwin's surreally real impersonation of him, Trump lit into The New York Times (again).
But on Monday he summoned heavies from the world of TV. Dozens trooped up to a 25th level conference room in Trump Tower, thinking foolishly that the man who had not held a proper news conference since July was about to answer their questions. No sir - the 45th-president-to-be merely wanted to vent at them.
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An underling would be dispatched to the morning TV talk shows to announce his retreat from an all-consuming, if questionable campaign position - that Hillary Clinton must be investigated and locked up for her alleged mishandling of classified information on a private email server. And his surprise climbdown and $US25 million settlement of class actions by students from his defunct and dodgy Trump University had been dispatched in a couple of tweets.
So why did Trump need this face-to-face confrontation with the television crowd?
Apparently he was upset with how he had been depicted by NBC reporter Katy Tur and the network's use of a photo that might have left viewers wondering if Trump had several chins. Trump actually wanted to know why they didn't think to use "nice" shots of him.
After talking to attendees, New Yorker editor David Remnick cut through the hurt feelings of the bunch from TV-land, to observe that the incoming President doesn't care who might know how unforgiving, how vain or how distracted he might be.
"This is who he is, and this is who will be running the executive branch of the United States government for four years … [he] showed no signs of having been sobered or changed by his elevation to the country's highest office."
One who attended the meeting told Remnick: "He is the same kind of blustering, bluffing blowhard as he was during the campaign."
Another ventured that Trump's behaviour was "totally inappropriate" and "f---ing outrageous".
Yet another: "He truly doesn't seem to understand the First Amendment; he doesn't - he thinks we're supposed to say what he says and that's it."
Good meeting, Mr President!
Then on Tuesday, Trump was to head about 20 blocks downtown in Manhattan, to the headquarters of The New York Times, because he needed to say how bad its coverage of the campaign had been; but then he got upset about whether his meeting with Times executives and reporters was to be on or off the record, and so he wasn't going; and then he did.
Bear in mind that all this on-again, off-again negotiation was conducted with tweets lobbing up and down the length of Fifth Avenue. And in fairness to Trump, once he got the expletive off his liver - "I think I've been treated very rough" - he did answer reporters' questions.
Now, he had an open mind on the Paris climate agreement, which he repeatedly promised to withdraw from while campaigning; he didn't want to inflict more "hurt" and "suffering" on Clinton after a campaign that had been "18 months of brutality in a true sense"; the law was so "totally on my side" that there could not be conflicts of interest between his presidential duties and his personal business empire; and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was likely to have a senior White House role, might help to broker peace between Israel and Palestine, but if it became a real possibility he'd take the high mark in a crisis that had defeated a dozen predecessors.
"I'd love to be the one who made peace with Israel and the Palestinians - that would be such a great achievement."
Just days after a neo-Nazi knees-up to celebrate his election win in Washington, replete with Hitler salutes, Trump said of the white nationalists who embrace him: "It's not a group I want to energise. And if they are energised, I want to look into it and find out why."
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