Trump makes New York Times wait for their beating

On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump gathered network executives for a ceremonial butt chewing.

“It was like a f---ing firing squad,” one source said of the meeting. "Trump started with [CNN President] Jeff Zucker and said, ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed.’"

Trump also said that the New York Times was scheduled to drop by the next day, apparently so that they could also line up against the wall. But if the purpose of these meetings was nothing more than to humiliate the press and show them that Trump had no intention of playing nice, he worked out an extra level of stick-it for the Times.

That change and that cancellation both were news to the newspaper.

The Times’s senior vice president for communications, Eileen M. Murphy, responded:

“We were unaware that the meeting was canceled until we saw the president-elect’s tweet this morning. We did not change the ground rules at all and made no attempt to. They tried to yesterday — asking for only a private meeting and no on-the-record segment, which we refused to agree to. In the end, we concluded with them that we would go back to the original plan of a small off-the-record session and a larger on-the-record session with reporters and columnists.”