In Florida:

A white Florida man has been charged with battery after he was accused of punching an Hispanic man in the back of the head “for Donald Trump.”

It happened in a parking lot behind a grocery store in Gainesville.

According to a police report obtained by Egberto Willies, Caleb Joseph Illig arrived at the parking lot at around 1:10 a.m. and began punching Pablo Echevarria in the back of the head.

The report said that Illig shouted, “Let’s Trump down,” as he punched Echevarria. When Echevarria asked why he was being attacked, Illig reportedly replied, “This is for Donald Trump.”

Trump the warrior against political correctness. Now that political correctness has been defeated, it’s cool for white guys to beat up people with names like “Echeverria.” It’s so PC and SJW to fail to beat up people with Spanish surnames.

Police said that security footage “clearly shows [Illig] striking [Echevarria] in the back of the head, and completely corroborates the [victim] and [witness’] accounts of the incident.”

Illig said he didn’t remember a thing about it.

The Times also reports on Trump’s jolly tweet about how he’d like to punish people who burn flags.

“Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!” Mr. Trump wrote in a 6:55 a.m. Twitter post.

Mr. Trump wrote the post shortly after Fox News aired a segment about a dispute at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, which removed the American flag from its campus flagpole after protests over his election victory; during one demonstration, someone burned a flag.

Ah, so that’s what he’s doing – watching Fox News and blurting out tweets in response to what he sees.

Even if Mr. Trump could persuade Congress to enact a criminal statute, a dramatic shift in the balance between government power and individual freedom, anyone convicted and sentenced under it could point to clear Supreme Court precedents to make the case for a constitutional violation.

The obstacles include the precedent that the Constitution does not allow the government to expatriate Americans against their will, through a landmark 1967 case, Afroyim v. Rusk. They also include a 1989 decision, Texas v. Johnson, in which the court struck down criminal laws banning flag burning, ruling that the act was a form of political expression protected by the First Amendment.

Well, sure, but what’s that got to do with Trump? He’s just been elected absolute dictator, hasn’t he? He certainly seems to think so.

David D. Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who co-wrote the Supreme Court briefs in the flag-burning case and who is about to become national legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said he wondered if Mr. Trump’s strategy was to goad people into burning flags in order to “marginalize” the protests against him. But he also called Mr. Trump’s proposal “beyond the pale.”

“To me it is deeply troubling that the person who is going to become the most powerful government official in the United States doesn’t understand the first thing about the First Amendment — which is you can’t punish people for expressing dissent — and also doesn’t seem to understand that citizenship is a constitutional right that cannot be taken away, period, under any circumstances,” he said.

“Troubling” is putting it mildly.

The Washington Post edges up to the task of discussing Trump’s pathological narcissism.

Trump’s frustration that he’ll be inaugurated despite having less demonstrated support than his opponent is the most likely explanation for his tweets. He’s clearly annoyed that Clinton agreed to participate in Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s efforts to review balloting in Wisconsin and other Midwestern states (an annoyance also made clear on Twitter). It’s remarkably similar to what happened when he lost the Iowa caucuses to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.): At first, he accepted the result as it was. Within a day or two, though, he began lashing out at Cruz, accusing him of stealing the vote in the state.

Of course, there’s no evidence that Cruz did anything that could be identified as “stealing” the election. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Trump was mad. (Incidentally, this was also the genesis of “Lyin’ Ted.”)

There has been some social-media speculation that Trump is laying the groundwork for federal efforts to curtail voting access. That’s probably backward. It’s more likely that Trump is leveraging long-standing, unfounded murmurs of rampant voter fraud as a way to assuage his ego, just as he claimed that Cruz stole the election to save face.

This has to be carefully explained to us, because it’s (still) so hard to believe that a grown man who has just been elected president of the US has that little self-control and discipline. It’s hard to believe and it’s also terrifying to believe. If he’s that out of control, maybe he’ll send a pilot to drop a nuclear weapon on our house because we sent him a rude tweet. If he’s that out of control, maybe he’ll speed up climate change even more out of sheer spite. If he’s that out of control, maybe there’s nothing we can do to limit the destruction.

The Washington Post dug into the likely source of Trump’s wild claim that millions of people voted illegally.

On Nov. 13, Gregg Phillips, a former Texas Health and Human Services Commission deputy commissioner, tweeted about there being 3 million votes that were cast by noncitizens.

https://twitter.com/JumpVote/status/797843232436748288

Phillips hasn’t provided any evidence for that claim. InfoWars and Drudge picked it up, but Drudge labeled it a “claim.”

When Matt Drudge qualifies something with “Claim:,” it’s worth treating it with skepticism.

The rumor-debunking site Snopes looked at Phillips’s claim and found no evidence for it. (It also noted that Phillips has a history of implying that Obamacare will lead to the registration of millions of immigrants here illegally.) Phillips replied on Twitter, “One might imagine someone would have called me.” That’s easier said than done; when I was looking at this earlier this month I couldn’t find a way to contact Phillips. An email to True the Vote, a conservative group focused on the issue of voter fraud (for which Phillips claims to be a board member), did not receive a reply.

Phillips has said that he will release evidence of his claims at some point in the future — but not to the media. As of writing, there simply isn’t any data to that effect.

Yet Trump – who will be president in a few weeks – is happy to blat out the accusation all the same. He’s the same reckless malevolent narcissist he’s always been.

New details on the conflicts of interest.

On Thanksgiving Day, a Philippine developer named Jose E. B. Antonio hosted a company anniversary bash at one of Manila’s poshest hotels. He had much to be thankful for.

In October, he had quietly been named a special envoy to the United States by the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte. Mr. Antonio was nearly finished building a $150 million tower in Manila’s financial district — a 57-story symbol of affluence and capitalism, which bluntly promotes itself with the slogan “Live Above the Rest.” And now his partner on the project, Donald J. Trump, had just been elected president of the United States.

After the election, Mr. Antonio flew to New York for a private meeting at Trump Tower with the president-elect’s children, who have been involved in the Manila project from the beginning, as have Mr. Antonio’s children. The Trumps and Antonios have other ventures in the works, including Trump-branded resorts in the Philippines, Mr. Antonio’s son Robbie Antonio said.

Isn’t that just cozy. Antonio is a special envoy to the US, and Trump is the next president of the US. How pleasant for both of them and their children.

Mr. Antonio’s combination of jobs — he is a business partner with Mr. Trump, while also representing the Philippines in its relationship with the United States and the president-elect — is hardly inconsequential, given some of the weighty issues on the diplomatic table.

Among them, Mr. Duterte has urged “a separation” from the United Statesand has called for American troops to exit the country in two years’ time. His antidrug crusade has resulted in the summary killings of thousands of suspected criminals without trial, prompting criticism from the Obama administration.

Situations like these are already leading some former government officials from both parties to ask if America’s reaction to events around the world could potentially be shaded, if only slightly, by the Trump family’s financial ties with foreign players. They worry, too, that in some countries those connections could compromise American efforts to criticize the corrupt intermingling of state power with vast business enterprises controlled by the political elite.

“It is uncharted territory, really in the history of the republic, as we have never had a president with such an empire both in the United States and overseas,” said Michael J. Green, who served on the National Security Council in the administration of George W. Bush, and before that at the Defense Department.

Or such a corrupt, self-serving, defiant president. The combination is going to be lethal.

a review by The Times of these business dealings identified a menu of the kinds of complications that could create a running source of controversy for Mr. Trump, as well as tensions between his priorities as president and the needs and objectives of his companies.

In Brazil, for example, the beachfront Trump Hotel Rio de Janeiro — one of Mr. Trump’s many branding deals, in which he does not have an equity stake — is part of a broad investigation by a federal prosecutor who is examining whether illicit commissions and bribes resulted in apparent favoritism by two pension funds that invested in the project.

Several of Mr. Trump’s real estate ventures in India — where he has more projects underway than in any location outside North America — are being built through companies with family ties to India’s most important political party. This makes it more likely that Indian government officials will do special favors benefiting Mr. Trump’s projects, including pressuring state-owned banks to extend favorable loans.

There’s Turkey. Will Trump look the other way while Erdogan keeps arresting dissidents and academics in exchange for favors to Trump’s business interests there?

What is clear is that there has been very little division, in the weeks since the election, between Mr. Trump’s business interests and his transition effort, with the president-elect or his family greeting real estate partners from India and the Philippines in his office and Mr. Trump raising concerns about his golf course in Scotland with a prominent British politician. Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who is in charge of planning and development of the Trump Organization’s global network of hotels, has joined in conversations with at least three world leaders — of Turkey, Argentina and Japan — having access that could help her expand the brand worldwide.

What is that? Why was she even allowed to do that? Why is any of this being allowed?

Then there’s that hotel in Rio, and the investigation by a federal prosecutor into why two pension funds invested so heavily in the hotel when it’s not even finished and is a risky investment?

And a lot more.

The Times basically says that Trump is lying.

President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Sunday that he had fallen short in the popular vote in the general election only because millions of people had voted illegally, leveling his claim — despite the absence of any such evidence — as part of a daylong storm of Twitter posts voicing anger about a three-state recount push.

That’s a cautious way of putting it, of course, but their meaning is pretty clear.

The series of posts came one day after Hillary Clinton’s campaign said it would participate in a recount effort being undertaken in Wisconsin, and potentially in similar pushes in Michigan and Pennsylvania, by Jill Stein, who was the Green Party candidate. Mr. Trump’s statements revived claims he made during the campaign, as polls suggested he was losing to Mrs. Clinton, about a rigged and corrupt system.

The Twitter outburst also came as Mr. Trump is laboring to fill crucial positions in his cabinet, with his advisers enmeshed in a rift over whom he should select as secretary of state. On Sunday morning, Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser, extended a public campaign to undermine one contender, Mitt Romney — a remarkable display by a member of a president-elect’s team. She accused Mr. Romney of having gone “out of his way to hurt” Mr. Trump during the Republican primary contests.

Professionalism in action.