MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President-elect Donald Trump has been holding court from his home in Palm Beach, Florida.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Business leaders have been making their way there - tech CEOs, pharma CEOs and yesterday, the CEO of a Japanese investment bank promising to spend $100 billion in the United States. The president-elect talked about this at his first news conference since the election.
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DONALD TRUMP: This is one of the big differences, I think, between - we were talking about it before. One of the big differences between the first term. In the first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.
INSKEEP: In truth, some people wanted to be his friend last time, but there is a difference. People who don't like this say wealthy people are bending the knee, but how do the executives see it?
MARTIN: NPR senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson was watching, and she's with us now. Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So the president-elect says everybody's trying to be his friend. Sounds about right?
LIASSON: Yeah, it does. Some of this is the normal anticipation and enthusiasm that the business community - billionaires, Wall Street - would have to any new Republican president who's going to cut their taxes and limit regulation. Some of it's because Trump's takeover of the Republican Party is now complete. There are no more Romneys and Flakes and Cheneys around. And some of it is that he's seen as a more legitimate president this time 'cause he won the popular vote.
But a lot of it is just a change in the approach of foreign leaders and business leaders and Democrats. They are using a different way to resist Trump compared to his first term. They're choosing their battles instead of across-the-board resistance. They believe his mind can be changed on things like TikTok, which now he sees as useful to him, or cryptocurrency because his family is now in the crypto business. So I think it's a different kind of resistance.
MARTIN: He talked about various dinners he's having with the CEOs. What stood out to you there?
LIASSON: Well, you know, he described a dinner he had with two big pharma CEOs and that industry's lobbying group. They're concerned about his pick for Health and Human Services Department, Robert F. Kennedy, who is an anti-vaccine activist. Here's how Trump described RFK Jr.
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TRUMP: No, I think he's going to be much less radical than you would think. I think he's got a very open mind, or I wouldn't have put him there. He's going to be very much less radical.
LIASSON: So he was asked about his own views on vaccines, and he gave full support to the polio vaccine. He said it's not going anywhere. But Trump did leave the door open to those who believe that vaccines are linked to autism, something that has been widely debunked. He said, quote, "we're going to find out." He also wasn't clear about his position on vaccine mandates. He was asked if schools should mandate vaccines, and he said, I'm not a big mandate person. But he also gave the pharma executives something they wanted. He was very hard on pharmacy benefit managers, who pharmaceutical companies blame for price hikes. He scornfully referred to them as middlemen.
MARTIN: And he also invited reporters into his home for a press conference. I think this is the first one since the election. Just say more about that. How did it go?
LIASSON: Well, it was a bit like all of his rallies in the campaign condensed into an hour and 10 minutes. He covered a lot of the same ground. He said that everything was pretty much perfect when he was president. There were no wars, no inflation. Now that he's going to be president again, he said things will be great again. There were a lot of exaggeration, and - that he won the youth vote by 34% or that he brought down the price of insulin to $35, which, although he did something on that, it was Biden who brought it down to $35. And there were still a lot of grievances. He talked about how he was going to sue the board of the Pulitzer Prizes and the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll that showed him losing. So very similar to the old Trump.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Mara Liasson. Mara, thank you.
LIASSON: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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