Donald Trump has reversed course on several campaign pledges including suggesting he will reconsider his view on withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, and has shown less confidence in the usefulness of waterboarding and other forms of torture.
In an interview with the New York Times, Mr Trump said he would “keep an open mind” about whether to abandon the climate treaty. After sparking controversy during the campaign by saying he would allow waterboarding, Mr Trump suggested he had been swayed by James Mattis, a retired general being considered for defence secretary, who told the president-elect at the weekend that he “never found it to be useful”.
The reversals came after a frenetic 24-hour blizzard of activity that had suggested Mr Trump would continue with the unpredictable, pugilistic style that marked his campaign. Over that period he clashed with media chiefs, unsettled Washington’s closest ally and backtracked on the legal fate of Hillary Clinton over her private email server.
Most of Mr Trump’s freewheeling decisions were broadcast over social media on Tuesday, a day after he broke with convention to announce a policy agenda for the first 100 days of his administration in a 150-second video posted on YouTube.
The events suggest that after a victory speech in which he appeared headed towards governing in a more conventional way, Mr Trump will remain as erratic as ever as president — both in the substance of his decisions and in the way he makes them.
“Trump got to be president-elect by breaking all the rules, and he clearly has no intention of obeying the rules now. We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia politics expert. “We’d better get used to saying that.”
The moves were capped by Kellyanne Conway, Mr Trump’s campaign manager, saying the president-elect had decided not to prosecute Mrs Clinton over her handling of secret information, arguing the move would help her “heal” from her loss. In the interview with the New York Times, Mr Trump said: “I don’t want to hurt the Clintons.”
His comments prompted a rare barrage of criticism from his supporters, including the rightwing Breitbart News, which labelled the decision a “broken promise”. Judicial Watch, which had spearheaded the campaign over Mrs Clinton’s emails, warned Mr Trump against a “betrayal of his promise to the American people to ‘drain the swamp’” of corruption in Washington.
In the interview, Mr Trump also distanced himself from the “alt-right”, a white supremacist movement that held an annual event in Washington at the weekend. “I disavow, and I condemn,” said Mr Trump, who also defended his chief strategist Steve Bannon, who previously ran Breitbart.
“If I thought he was a racist or alt-right … I wouldn't even think about hiring him,” Mr Trump said of Mr Bannon, who has previously described Breitbart as a platform for the alt-right.
Earlier on Tuesday the British government was forced to defend its ambassador to Washington, Sir Kim Darroch, after Mr Trump recommended that he be replaced by Nigel Farage, the UK Independence party chief who grew close to Mr Trump during Mr Farage’s campaign to take Britain out of the EU.
“We have an excellent ambassador to the United States and he will continue in his work,” a UK government spokesman said. “We appoint our ambassadors.”
The flurry of unconventional activity came as Mr Trump continued to be dogged by questions about his past business and charitable dealings. Speaking to the New York Times, Mr Trump pushed back against allegations he is using the presidency to advance his business interests, saying that conflict of interest rules did not apply to the president.
“The law’s totally on my side, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he said.
The Democratic National Committee said Mr Trump had campaigned against a culture of self-enrichment but “made clear today [on Tuesday] that he doesn’t think the rules apply to him”, and that he “intends to use the Oval Office to expand his family’s wealth”.
Mr Trump’s charitable foundation was separately forced to admit it had engaged in legally prohibited transactions that amounted to “self-dealing” under Internal Revenue Service rules.
The acknowledgment in the Donald J Trump Foundation’s 2015 tax return said it had transferred income or assets to a “disqualified person”, which under the tax code would include Mr Trump, his family members and his businesses. The foundation admitted to engaging in similar transactions in previous years. “It is a large issue,” said Steve Rosenthal of Washington-based think-tank the Urban Institute. “The penalties for self-dealing are really stiff.”
While Mr Trump had toned down his rhetoric since the election, he has continued the public clashes with the media. He berated numerous high-profile television journalists and network executives in a Monday meeting that some had assumed would be an effort to clear the air.
Speaking to MSNBC, however, Ms Conway dismissed suggestions that he had attacked the media representatives, saying it had been a “very lively, spirited discussion”.
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