Donald Trump might be going soft but his supporters don’t seem to mind

‘Mister Softie’, screams the headline on the New York Daily News, with Donald Trump’s luxurious comb-over transformed into an ice-cream twist. The president elect is back-pedalling, flip-flopping and cozying up to his enemies. Going soft. Before he has even taken up residence in the White House, America’s liberal media has declared Trump a traitor to the millions of people who delivered a shock election win. The reason is Tuesday’s lunchtime chat with the New York Times, in which he said he wasn’t that fussed about locking up Hillary Clinton, suggested he had an open mind on climate change and rather toned down his support of torture in the fight against terrorism.

It is all a far cry from the campaign, when his rallies were punctuated by calls to ‘Lock her up’, his earlier suggestion that climate change was a Chinese conspiracy to make the US less competitive, and his pledge that terror suspects would be waterboarded – a practice banned under Barack Obama. All of which raises some interesting questions.