Trump Sticks to His Guns, Firing Twitter Salvos and Igniting Drama

© Sam Hodgson for The New York Times President-elect Donald J. Trump had dinner on Tuesday with his incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, left, and Mitt Romney, a potential choice for secretary of state, at Jean-Georges in New York

It began at dawn, with a Twitter post about flag-burning.

In a period of just over 24 hours, stretching from the early hours of Tuesday into Wednesday morning, President-elect Donald J. Trump raced through perhaps the most frenetic day of activity since the election. With a series of surprise announcements and impulsive public gestures, he brought into sharp focus the freewheeling and compulsively theatrical style he will bring to the Oval Office.

There was the incendiary pronouncement about the flag: After Fox News aired a segment about protests that included flag-burning, Mr. Trump suggested stripping people who burned the flag of their citizenship, even though the act is constitutionally protected free speech.

There were hazy but headline-grabbing statements of policy: Mr. Trump announced a tentative pact with the air-conditioning company Carrier to protect some jobs at an Indiana factory, and pledged again to sever ties with his real estate empire, without offering specifics.

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There was a new and indiscreet round of tryouts for secretary of state, featuring reviews from the president-elect in something like real time. Having paraded David H. Petraeus, the former military commander and C.I.A. director, past a throng of reporters for a meeting on Monday, Mr. Trump dined on Tuesday with Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012 and another candidate for the job.

They huddled at a French restaurant on Central Park West in Manhattan, briefly admitting the news media to take photographs of the smiling pair over scallops.

On display, if not on the menu, was government à la Trump.

While Mr. Trump’s focus appeared to careen unpredictably from hour to hour, the larger pattern he followed was a familiar one. As a candidate, Mr. Trump operated largely on gut instinct, with publicity-seeking provocation as his chief tactic. Trusting few people outside a circle of intimates, Mr. Trump thrived in a daily cycle of controversy and cultivated an atmosphere of often-public drama and division within his campaign.

© Sam Hodgson for The New York Times A personalized lectern was wheeled through the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan on Monday. Much as he did during the campaign, Mr. Trump has kept the political world hanging on his every move, no matter how impetuous or trivial. He has aired his partial or fleeting thoughts, toying with the idea of making Rudolph W. Giuliani his secretary of state before appearing to lose interest. He has tolerated and even welcomed unsubtle combat over his selections, allowing a senior adviser, Kellyanne Conway, to roundly attack Mr. Romney on television while he remains a top contender for the cabinet.

When Mr. Trump has incited controversy — with his flag-burning Twitter post, or an earlier allegation of mass voter fraud — Mr. Trump has declined to elaborate or justify his claims, and has left aides struggling to defend them, when they have tried at all.

Mr. Trump’s method, friends and allies say, matches the reputation he built first in New York and then on reality television — less as a traditional corporate executive, like Mr. Romney, than as an eager impresario who experimented freely, welcomed conflict and flopped repeatedly.

Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House who has advised Mr. Trump, said Mr. Trump’s transition process “very much resembles the way he operated in ‘The Apprentice,’” the NBC show in which Mr. Trump functioned as an imposing protagonist subjecting aspiring entrepreneurs to contests of business acumen.

Mr. Gingrich said Mr. Trump plainly relished personal contact with possible appointees and favored a free-form leadership style. The president-elect did not emerge, Mr. Gingrich said, from a “corporate, staffed background,” but from a more personality-driven, improvisational environment.

“In a lot of ways, what you’re seeing is the continuation of techniques and lessons he learned from doing what was, at one time, the No. 1 TV show,” Mr. Gingrich said. “I think that’s a key part of how you explain a lot of his behavior.”

For longtime critics of Mr. Trump, the spectacle of his transition has come as a kind of nightmarish vindication, seeming to confirm their warnings about what it would mean to have a reality television star in the nation’s most powerful office.

Mr. Trump’s opponents in the Republican primary campaign criticized him repeatedly as a showman and not a real executive. At a Washington dinner in 2011, President Obama ridiculed the notion that Mr. Trump could run for president, recounting an episode of “The Celebrity Apprentice” in which Mr. Trump fired the actor Gary Busey and joking, “These are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night.”

Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for Mr. Obama who was an author of his speech belittling Mr. Trump, described a sense of horror at seeing the joke turn into reality.

“It is extremely chilling that Donald Trump views the spectacle of choosing cabinet appointments in a way that is similar to deciding whether or not to fire Lil Jon or Joan Rivers,” Mr. Lovett said, referring to contestants on the show. “It’s not like people have been joking about Donald Trump,” he added, “and then he really proved us wrong.”

It would be difficult to overstate the extremity of Mr. Trump’s departure from recent presidential practice. His immediate predecessors prided themselves on orderly, fastidious deliberations: George W. Bush as the first president with a business degree, Mr. Obama as a candidate branded by aides as “no drama Obama.”

Even Republicans concede that it is not clear how Mr. Trump’s roller-coaster approach to the transition will carry over to governing. Mr. Gingrich predicted during the Republican primary contests that a Trump administration would function as a kind of daily adventure. “If Trump does end up winning, you will have no idea each morning what’s going to happen,” Mr. Gingrich predicted in a January interview, “because he will have no idea.”

But enacting sweeping changes or passing even modest legislation requires intensive, sustained attention from presidents and their teams, of a kind Mr. Trump has never dedicated to matters of policy.

Since the election, Mr. Trump has made only a few one-off announcements aimed at soothing controversy or bolstering his popularity, like the Carrier deal or his pledge to preserve certain elements of the Affordable Care Act. But he has not situated any of his pronouncements within a larger, cohesive agenda, or answered even basic questions about them, like whether the terms extended to Carrier should be made available to other companies.

Mr. Trump has appeared comparatively uninterested in a set of lower-profile appointments in which his close advisers, like Mike Pence, the vice president-elect, and Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, have quietly installed Republican stalwarts.

On Tuesday, after Mr. Trump raged on Twitter about flag-burning, his transition team announced the selection of Elaine L. Chao, a former labor secretary, to lead the Department of Transportation, and Representative Tom Price of Georgia, a conservative hard-liner, as Mr. Trump’s choice for health secretary.

On Twitter, Mr. Trump made only one perfunctory mention each of Ms. Chao and Mr. Price, the man who would most likely be tasked with carrying out some of the president-elect’s most important campaign promises. By comparison, on Monday and Tuesday, Mr. Trump posted on Twitter twice about the Carrier deal and five times to criticize CNN for its coverage of him.

Michael O. Leavitt, a former governor of Utah who prepared Mr. Romney’s transition team before the 2012 election, said a presidential transition usually “takes on the personality of the principal.” Mr. Trump, he said, was taking an exceptionally public approach and showing far less regard than usual for the privacy of job candidates.

But Mr. Leavitt credited Mr. Trump with being “ahead of schedule on major appointments” and finding his way toward a more “orderly way of doing business.”

“This is Donald Trump doing it his way, and no one should expect any different,” Mr. Leavitt said. “That doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong — it’s just Trump.”

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