This Week in the Trump Locker Room

Jared Kushner

Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, bought the New York Observer in 2006, when Kushner was 25. The veteran editor of The Observer, Peter Kaplan, quickly soured on Kushner: “This guy doesn’t know what he doesn’t know,” Mr. Kaplan complained to colleagues at the time.

Mitt Romney

Well before the Republican National Convention, Mitt Romney said in front of cameras that if Mr. Trump became the Republican nominee, “the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished,” and he suggested that Mr. Trump was dangerous and unstable. He deplored Mr. Trump’s personal qualities: “the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.”

President Elect Donald Trump

The recently opened Trump International Hotel in Washington, which Donald Trump owns, invited representatives from local embassies to the hotel for a tour after the election to encourage them to use it when leaders from their countries visited Washington. Mr. Trump also met during the week of November 14 in his office at Trump Tower with three Indian business partners who are building a Trump-branded luxury apartment complex south of Mumbai. "There does not seem to be any sign of a meaningful separation of Trump government operations and his business operations,” said Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics.

General Michael Flynn

Gen. Flynn, according to Nicholas Kristof, is smart and knows the world very well, but he was fired from his last government job -- the Defense Intelligence Agency -- for incompetence. Colin Powell, former secretary of state, explained in hacked emails why Flynn was fired: “abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad management.” He is regarded by many Republican and Democratic foreign policy specialists as "a kook." Colin Powell said that after his firing, he went  “right-wing nutty.” In November 2016, Flynn tweeted an obviously fake story claiming that the police had found emails linking Hillary Clinton to sex crimes with children.

General Michael Flynn

Flynn is also actually also a consultant for lobbyists. He went on an expenses-paid trip to Moscow as the guest of Vladimir Putin. He wrote an op-ed in The Hill "shilling for Turkey" without revealing that he has also taken consulting money from a company tied to Turkish president Erdogan.

President-Elect Donald Trump

The first foreign leader that Donald Trump placed a telephone call to was Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey. “I have a little conflict of interest ’cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” Trump told Stephen Bannon in an interview during the campaign. (Bannon was still running Breitbart at the time and had not yet been named Chief Strategist for Trump.) When British Prime Minister Theresa May finally got through to Trump on the phone -- she called him. He didn't call her -- Trump said, “If you travel to the U.S., you should let me know.” The Trump-May conversation lasted 10 minutes.

General Michael Flynn

For his chief of staff, Gen. Flynn chose his son, Michael G. Flynn. Michael has been aggressive on right-wing social media. He's been called "looney" for calling President Obama a communist and a fascist. He shared stories alleging top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin had a connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, pushed a conspiracy theory that Sen. Marco Rubio was a closeted homosexual who abused cocaine, and repeatedly used expletives to attack Trump's political opponents. Flynn works for his father's consulting firm, Flynn Intel Group, and he is reportedly always at his father's side.

Federal Judge John Primomo

At a U.S. citizenship ceremoney on November 17 in San Antonio, Judge Primomo, who was conducting the naturalization swearing in, lectured the new citizens: “I can assure you that whether you voted for him or you did not vote for him, if you are a citizen of the United States, he is your president. He will be your president and if you do not like that, you need to go to another country.”