A buoyant Trump believes he has a mandate to hit the ground running as he revels behind closed doors
CNN
President-elect Donald Trump is reveling in his victory and the subsequent celebration, being described as having a much different mentality than he did in 2017 and feeling like his popular vote win gives him a mandate as he speaks with world leaders, top aides and allies, business CEOs and his transition team.
President-elect Donald Trump is reveling in his victory and the subsequent celebration, being described as having a much different mentality than he did in 2017 and feeling like his popular vote win gives him a mandate as he speaks with world leaders, top aides and allies, business CEOs and his transition team. Sources who have spoken to Trump in the last 24 hours describe him as forward-looking and grateful. He has lavished praise on his campaign co-chairs, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who is widely considered the front runner to be his chief of staff. Trump has boasted about his numbers with minority voters and winning the popular vote, sometimes with disbelief, and asked what they need to do to get started on some of his agenda items. One person described the president-elect as in a “completely different head space” than he was when he was entering office in 2017. With some sources he talked about some of the various events that would be occurring under his presidency, including the World Cup and Olympics. With another he marveled at the positivity and flattery he has received in calls from the more than dozen foreign leaders with whom he has spoken. “He feels like he’s getting the respect and recognition he deserves,” another source said. In the 2016 election, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton – and he repeatedly claimed falsely that he had won it. Trump then took office in January 2017 amid an FBI investigation into Russian election interference that he believed threatened his legitimacy and would eventually lead to the appointment of a special counsel who investigated Trump for the first half of his presidency. Now Trump is ahead in the popular vote by more than 4 million votes and feels like he’s coming into office with a clear runway to enact the policies he ran on, sources close to the president-elect said.
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