Team to show a preholiday focus on the cabinet.
Mr. Trump will hunker down in Trump Tower on Tuesday for one last day of cabinet deliberations before heading to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., for Thanksgiving.
For a second day in a row, Mr. Trump will spend part of his day in meetings with news organizations that he sparred with frequently during the 18-month presidential campaign. On Monday, he met with big names in the television news industry, criticizing their coverage of the campaign and calling them shortsighted in missing the signs of his upset victory.
Sometime midday Tuesday, the president-elect will meet with editors and reporters at The New York Times, a frequent target of his ire. The sit-down will consist of a small, off-the-record session, followed by an on-the-record session between Mr. Trump and Times reporters and columnists.
"As those invitations come through, we'll be going through them and absolutely sorting them out and scheduling them," Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser to Mr. Trump and his former campaign manager, said of meetings between him and journalists. "I'm all for it."
As a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump had a rocky relationship with the news media. He frequently used news outlets as a free method of distribution for his political message. But he also clashed repeatedly with reporters and television personalities.
One thing he has not done for months is hold a news conference where he takes questions from the national reporters who have spent months covering him. Asked whether he would soon hold a news conference — something President-elect Barack Obama did three days after the election in 2008 — Ms. Conway said he would, but declined to say when.
"The man works 18 hours a day, interviewing people, taking calls from all around the world," she said. "He will have a press conference in due course."
In the meantime, Mr. Trump is headed late Tuesday or early Wednesday for Florida, where aides said he would spend Thanksgiving with his family before getting back to work to assemble his administration.
Little pressure is felt to announce appointees.
Despite a flurry of activity over the last several days, including more than two dozen interviews with potential cabinet appointees, the pace of announcements from Trump Tower has slowed to a crawl.
Aides to Mr. Trump say they are unconcerned and will not be pushed by the expectations of journalists or others to make announcements before they are ready.
Mr. Trump was quick to announce his chief of staff and several members of his national security team. But on Monday, Ms. Conway continued to toy with reporters about the timing of any further announcements.
"It could come this week," she said. "It could come today. But we're not in a rush to publish names just because everybody is looking for the next story, respectfully. You have got to get it right. We know we are ahead of schedule when you compare to previous presidents-elect."
That is true. Mr. Obama did not make any major cabinet announcements until after the Thanksgiving break in 2008. It could be that Mr. Trump keeps his counsel on any other major announcements until then, as well. That would mean that decisions about who will be chosen for secretary of state — Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mitt Romney or someone else — might not come until December.
Or they could come sooner.
Obama awards his last Medals of Freedom.
President Obama continues to whittle down his bucket list. On Tuesday, he will present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to an assortment of popular athletes, singers and actors. It is Mr. Obama's last chance to bestow the honor, and he has taken full advantage by assembling a who's who of personal favorites.
Among those receiving the honor will be the basketball greats Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; the musical stars Bruce Springsteen and Diana Ross; and the actors Robert De Niro, Tom Hanks, Robert Redford and Cicely Tyson. Other luminaries attending include Bill and Melinda Gates and Lorne Michaels, the creator and executive producer of "Saturday Night Live."
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