Monday, Dec. 21

· Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to bring all of President-elect Joe Biden’s cabinet picks to the Senate floor to vote on their confirmations.

· Biden’s Digital Director Rob Flaherty announced Twitter plans to erase all followers of the @POTUS and @White House accounts and that the Biden administration will have to start from zero. Biden’s team took issue with this considering President Donald Trump absorbed all of President Barack Obama’s followers in 2016.

· Politico reported that Trump met with a group of congressional Republicans at the White House to strategize last-ditch efforts to overturn November’s presidential election results. The day’s meetings reportedly involved Vice President Mike Pence and about a dozen lawmakers spearheaded by Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.).

· Trump signed an executive order establishing classical architecture as the preferred style for new federal buildings.

· Attorney General Bill Barr announced criminal charges against a former Libyan intelligence operative accused of building the explosive used in one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in history: the 1988 bombing of Pam Am Flight 103.

· The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Walmart, alleging that the chain fueled the opioid crisis by knowingly filling questionable prescriptions.

· Congress overwhelmingly approved the long-debated $900 billion, second coronavirus stimulus package. Though less than half the size of the $2.2 trillion stimulus passed in March, it is still one of the largest relief packages in modern U.S. history.

Tuesday, Dec. 22

· Trump announced plans to appoint allies and confidants to government boards, including the assignment of former advisor Hope Hicks to the board overseeing Fulbright scholarships and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

· California Gov. Gavin Newsom picked California Secretary of State Alex Padilla to take over Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ Senate seat.

· Top federal U.S. health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins and Alex Azar II, received the Moderna coronavirus vaccine on camera.

· In a tweeted video, Trump rejected Congress’s $900 billion stimulus deal, demanding $2,000 in stimulus checks to Americans against House Republican wishes, despite his instructing Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to tell lawmakers to negotiate for $600 checks in the first place. The rejection left Congress scrambling to avoid an imminent government shutdown.

Wednesday, Dec. 23

· The House’s top lawyer, Douglas Letter, submitted a court filing arguing a Republican lawsuit from earlier this year against the House’s expanded allowance of proxy voting during the pandemic must be thrown out because two Republican House members involved in the suit just voted by proxy.

· Trump granted pardons to 29 people, many of whom pled guilty to obstructing the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, including real estate developer Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; former campaign chairman Paul Manafort; former advisor George Papadopoulos; and four former Blackwater contractors who were convicted on charges related to a 2007 massacre of civilians in Iraq.

· Trump vetoed a $741 billion defense policy bill over objections to renaming military bases honoring Confederate leaders and online liability protections.

· Politico reported on Trump’s increasing reliance on QAnon figures — followers of the widely debunked conspiracy theory that Trump is on a secret mission to oust politicians and celebrities involved in a Satanic pedophile cabal — to legitimize his bid to overturn the presidential election results, in the process boosting QAnon’s presence in mainstream culture.

· Pfizer reached a deal with the federal government to provide 100 million vaccine doses to be delivered by the end of July.

· Trump amped up tensions with Iran by threatening retaliation for rocket attacks in Iraq that the U.S. accuses an Iranian-backed militia group of conducting.

Thursday, Dec. 24

· In response to a variant of the novel coronavirus identified in the U.K., the White House issued a coronavirus testing mandate on those flying from Britain.

Friday, Dec. 25

· The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms took the lead in the investigation of an explosion planted in a recreational vehicle in Nashville, Tennessee. The explosion caused three people to be hospitalized with injuries, and damaged 40 businesses, but did not cause any fatalities.

Saturday, Dec. 26

· Unemployment aid for people who lost their jobs as a result of the coronavirus pandemic temporary lapsed as Trump wavered on signing the $900 stimulus package.

Sunday, Dec. 27

· Two days before the government would have had to shut down, Trump signed the $900 billion stimulus package. “I will sign the omnibus and Covid package with a strong message that makes clear to Congress that wasteful items need to be removed,” Trump said. “I will send back to Congress a redlined version, item by item, accompanied by the formal rescission request to Congress insisting that those funds be removed from the bill.”