WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump appeared to soften some of his hardest-line campaign positions on immigration on Sunday, but he also restated his pledge to roll back abortion rights and used Twitter to lash out at his critics, leaving open the possibility that he would continue using social media in the Oval Office and radically change the way presidents speak to Americans.
In his first prime-time television interview since his upset victory on Tuesday, Mr. Trump repeated his promise to name a Supreme Court justice who opposed abortion rights and would help overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized them, returning the issue to the states.
Asked where that would leave women seeking abortions, Mr. Trump said on the CBS program “60 Minutes,” “Well, they’ll perhaps have to go — they’ll have to go to another state.”
On immigration, he said the wall that he has been promising to build on the nation’s southern border might end up being a fence in places. But he said his priority was to deport two million to three million immigrants he characterized as dangerous or as having criminal records, a change from his original position that he would deport all of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country. President Obama has deported more than two million undocumented immigrants during his time in office.
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Mr. Trump said that undocumented immigrants who are not criminals are “terrific people,” and that he would decide how to handle them after the border is secure. The House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, echoed the president-elect, saying on Sunday that there would be no deportation force, something Mr. Trump had promised to create early in his campaign.
“That’s not what we’re focused on,” Mr. Ryan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Mr. Trump also said he considered the Supreme Court decision last year that validated same-sex marriages as settled, and that he was “fine with that.” He endorsed popular aspects of President Obama’s health insurance law, including a provision that requires coverage of people with pre-existing medical conditions and one that allows young people to remain on their parents’ plans until the age of 26.
But even as he appeared to inch toward the political center, Mr. Trump used a series of postings on Twitter to argue that The New York Times’s coverage of him has been “BAD” and “very poor and highly inaccurate.” He falsely stated that The Times had issued an apology to readers, an apparent reference to a letter to readers from The Times’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and its executive editor, Dean Baquet. The letter noted the unpredictable nature of the election and said The Times aimed to “rededicate” itself to “the fundamental mission of Times journalism.”
In the letter, The Times posed a series of what it called inevitable questions, including, “Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?”
Mr. Trump also claimed that the newspaper had been losing thousands of subscribers over its campaign coverage. In a Twitter message in reply to Mr. Trump, The Times said it had seen a “surge” in new subscriptions since the election — four times the pre-election rate.
“We’re proud of our election coverage & we will continue to ‘hold power to account,’” The Times said.
Mr. Trump, in another Twitter post, said The Times had falsely reported that he believed additional nations should acquire nuclear arms.
However, in an interview in March with The Times, Mr. Trump, asked about the North Korean threat to its neighbors, said he thought America’s allies might need their own nuclear deterrent.
“If Japan had that nuclear threat, I’m not sure that would be a bad thing for us,” he said. Later, he added, “The bottom line is, I think that frankly, as long as North Korea’s there, I think that Japan having a capability is something that maybe is going to happen whether we like it or not.”
His posts on Twitter were a striking public display from a man who, after winning the election, had worked to project an air of seriousness and self-discipline, first in a victory speech early Wednesday and then in an Oval Office meeting the next day with Mr. Obama, whom he called a “good man” for whom he had “great respect.”
But by Thursday evening, Mr. Trump was using Twitter to complain about demonstrations against his victory, saying they were being mounted by “professional protesters, incited by the media,” and branding them as “very unfair!”
The social media sniping — unparalleled in the history of presidential communication — suggested that Mr. Trump plans to bring his confrontational style of speaking to Americans to the White House, working to undercut news outlets that do not comport with his views, silence his critics and elevate his own standing. On Sunday, he selected Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, a site known for its nationalist, racially charged and conspiracy-laden coverage, to be his chief strategist and senior counselor.
It was only one indication of the extraordinary nature of the president-elect’s tactics and those of his inner circle.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, Mr. Trump suggested he would not hold to the longstanding post-Watergate tradition of presidents refraining from interfering in F.B.I. criminal matters, hinting that he would quiz the director, James B. Comey, about his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server before deciding whether to dismiss him.
“I’m not sure,” Mr. Trump said when asked if he would seek Mr. Comey’s resignation. “I would have to see — he may have had very good reasons for doing what he did.”
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