Mr. President-elect Donald Trump, please explain yourself

If ever it were clear that President-elect Donald Trump needs to start holding news conferences, it’s after Thursday when his tweet about Lockheed Martin caused its market share to plummet and his tweet about nuclear proliferation caused Americans to wonder if he were starting an arms race.

Trump simply needs to discuss big issues in more than 140 characters. Will he? No one should hold their breath, but we all should hold him accountable.

Trump used Twitter like no one else this year, frequently being retweeted by tens of thousands of his 17.8 million followers. But Saturday will mark the 150th day in a row that Trump has not answered media questions in a free-ranging news conference.

At Trump’s last one, on July 27, Trump began by saying, “So, it’s been 235 days since crooked Hillary Clinton has had a press conference.”

Now no president-elect in modern history has waited so long to hold a news conference. Bill Clinton waited nine days. President Obama waited three days. George W. Bush waited two after the Supreme Court declared him the winner in December 2000. Trump was elected nearly seven weeks ago.

After he tweeted that “tremendous cost and cost overruns of the Lockheed Martin F-35” made him ask “Boeing to price-out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet!” Reuters reported most defense analysts don’t consider the jets comparable and one U.S. official said it was impossible to tell what Trump meant. MarketWatch reported Lockheed’s market capitalization was on track to drop $1.5 billion.

And what of Trump’s tweet that the U.S. “must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its sense regarding nukes”? A day later, a talk-show host said Trump had just told her, by way of clarification, “Let it be an arms race.” Suddenly, the weighty issue of nuclear weapons is hanging on a single tweet and a second-hand account of a telephone interview.

That’s no way to run a country.

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