'We’ve just finished opening our presents, and we’re exhausted'
The 2020 National Christmas Tree outside the White House.
On his first Christmas Day in the White House, President Richard Nixon managed to squeeze in an hour and eight minutes for dinner with his wife.
The inveterate politician spent the rest of December 25, 1969, in a 12-hour telephone marathon, building up chits he could later cash with Washington power players, business titans, state governors and other world leaders. Nixon called German Chancellor Willy Brandt and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. He shot the breeze with his national security adviser Henry Kissinger and some of the President’s men who the Watergate scandal would later make famous.
The White House diary of Nixon’s appointments shows the President also called his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, who was liberated from the cares of office back home on his Texas ranch and who told Nixon, “We’ve got the motorbikes going here and the big wheels and dogs and everything.”
The first page of Nixon's 1969 Christmas Day agenda.
Nixon was a more obsessive politician than most, but his Christmas Day phone blitzes that endured throughout his term-and-a-half are a reminder that even in the season of peace and goodwill, politics never stops for Presidents. LBJ was another phone addict. On Christmas Day 1963, just a month following his sudden elevation to the presidency after the Kennedy assassination, the President phoned an illustrious predecessor and his wife. “Mamie and I are just so old, we’ve just finished opening our presents, and we’re just exhausted,” ex-President Dwight Eisenhower told LBJ.
Modern presidents have spent Christmas Day in the White House, at the Camp David retreat or in sunnier climes, but the job often gets in the way. While digesting his first White House Christmas dinner in 1981, Ronald Reagan received an irked letter from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. “It seems we’re intervening in Poland and he’s upset about it,” Reagan recorded in his diary, referring to US calls for democracy in the Warsaw Pact state.
Reagan giving his radio address to the nation from Camp David in 1983.
Twenty-eight years later, global turmoil intruded on Barack Obama’s first Christmas Day as President in Hawaii when an Al-Qaeda operative tried and failed to down a US airliner over Detroit with a bomb hidden in his underwear. An initially sluggish White House response was blamed by critics on Obama’s seclusion nearly 5,000 miles from Washington. It was a lesson his team never forgot during seven subsequent Christmas trips to his native state.
George W. Bush spent 12 Christmases at Camp David in the Catoctin Mountains in Maryland — four when his dad was President and eight on his own watch. He usually headed to his Texas ranch for New Year’s but his tradition was appreciated by Secret Service agents and White House staffers who got to spend Christmas Day at home with their families. On his last Christmas Eve as President in 2008, the Bushes had a Texas-style supper of enchiladas and tamales. But it was roast turkey with all the trimmings and pumpkin pie on Christmas Day, according to the White House menu.
Bush making a Christmas Eve telephone call to US Armed Forces in 2008, from Camp David.
This Christmas will be the last for Donald Trump’s aspiring "southern White House" at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where the 45th President will be stewing over his election loss. And one thing is for sure: Obama won’t be sitting by his phone waiting for a call bringing the compliments of the season from his embittered successor.
The Obamas during Christmas dinner at a Marine Corps base in Kaneohe, Hawaii, in 2010.
The world and America
Thousands of truck drivers are stuck at the UK port of Dover without food, toilets or showers.
Even Russian doctors are skeptical of the country’s fast-tracked Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine.
And a new study found that over half of Chinese adults are overweight.
Meanwhile in America, southern border wall construction continues.
Trump vetoed a massive defense spending bill broadly backed by his own party...
...and pardoned 26 more people, including Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner's dad.
The FBI accused Iran of making online death threats to US election officials.
And ‘tis the season for falling iguanas in Florida.
Postcard from Boynton Beach
On the Saturday before Christmas, drivers lined up before dawn in Boynton Beach, Florida, to wait for food handouts — a scene replayed in many American cities as the pandemic claims lives and livelihoods, spreading hunger across the country.
One of the drivers, Deborah Hightower, cried and her body shook with emotion as she looked through her windshield at the more than 100 cars in line. Most had arrived in the pre-dawn hours to receive the offerings from a local food bank. Some drivers and passengers slept in their cars. "(They) have got to be desperate to come sit for almost five hours to get a box of food for their family," she said.
The 57-year-old accountant and mother of three teenagers said she lost her job twice since March. Her eyes welled up -- not over her grim reality, but from seeing the bumper-to-bumper need around her. "I would hate for me to get the last of something," she said. "And the person behind me be in a worse position than I am."
Read the report by Rosa Flores, Denise Royal and Sara Weisfeldt here.
Sound familiar?
Americans remain in economic limbo after Trump released a video criticizing the $900 billion relief package awaiting his signature. The President says he objects to low individual payments and a litany of line items, but many of the disputed expenditures aren’t actually part of the stimulus bill; they’re included in an omnibus spending bill attached to the Covid-19 relief — and as CNN’s Kevin Liptak reports, they track almost exactly with what Trump requested in his 2021 budget.
Here is a list of what Trump complained about in his video, compared to the figure requested in his yearly budget:
Trump's complaint: $85.5 million for assistance to Cambodia
Trump's budget proposal: $82,505,000 for assistance for Cambodia.
Trump's complaint: $134 million to Burma
Trump's budget proposal: $131,450,000 for assistance to Burma
Trump's complaint: $1.3 billion for Egypt and the Egyptian military
Trump's budget proposal: $1,300,000,000 for assistance for Egypt
Trump's complaint: $25 million for democracy and gender programs in Pakistan
Trump's budget proposal: $15,000,000 for democracy programs and $10,000,000 for gender programs.
Trump's complaint: $505 million to Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama
Trump's budget proposal: $519,885,000 for Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama
Trump's complaint: $40 million for the Kennedy Center
Trump's budget proposal: $40,400,000 for the Kennedy Center (operations plus capital repair and restoration)
Trump's complaint: $1 billion for the Smithsonian
Trump's budget proposal: $1,110,313,000 (salaries/expenses plus facilities capital:)
Trump's complaint: $154 million for the National Gallery of Art.
Trump's budget proposal: $161,587,000
'His ego always comes first'
Discussing the stalled relief bill with CNN's Jake Tapper on Wednesday, a GOP official complained: “The Trump tantrum has nothing to do with check size or spending—he was fully aware of the negotiations carried out in his behalf by (White House Chief of Staff Mark) Meadows and (Treasury Secretary Steve) Mnuchin and never said peep," the official said. "When it comes to venting rage and seeking revenge vs. millions losing unemployment the day after Christmas and millions losing apartments and millions of small businesses going under, there is no contest: his ego always comes first,” the official added.