Stay tuned for a message from Facebook after the show.

Good Wednesday morning. I'm Jake Sherman and welcome to your political playbook audio briefing.

And I'm Anna Palmer. We jumped the gun last week, but this will indeed be our last audio briefing.

We hope you have a safe and healthy holiday and truly thank you for coming along for the ride for the last

four years listening to us each and every morning. Okay, now back to the show. It was supposed

to be quiet, but we should have known better. In one night, President Donald Trump pardoned

three crooked former Republican congressmen, some private security guards who killed civilians in Iraq, endorsed a

primary challenge to Senator John Thune, the Republican of South Dakota, a candidate to be the next

Senate GOP leader, and is on the brink of blowing up a massive bipartisan spending and COVID

relief deal that his administration negotiated with Capitol Hill.

We're sorry if you decided to unplug or downshift in these closing days of this wretched year.

If you weren't paying attention, Trump released a quite bizarre video Tuesday night in which he

suggested he was unhappy with the COVID relief and government funding deal that his administration

was a party to. He spent much of the video decrying the

foreign spending in the package, suggesting it shouldn't be in a coronavirus bill. Of course, the foreign

spending wasn't part of the relief package, but rather a government funding bill it was twin

with to east paxage in the Senate. Sources tell us that Trump was angry at that foreign spending,

although he signed similar spending countless times before without a beep. And he was also eager to one-up Congress on the direct payments portion.

He said he wanted $2,000 checks, and Congress had only approved $600 checks. The thinking in the White

House, if there is any at all, seems to be that Trump is eager to show he's more generous than Congress

and wants to put more money in the pocket of everyday Americans. They think it's never wrong to go against the hill and act like the outsider that he thinks himself to be. Plus, he puts everyone in a jam and redirects the attention back his way. Of course, he also makes a complete fool of Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, Washington's most eager manned and the rest of the administration as a

result. The 600 check was their idea. Don't be fooled here. The White House was wishy-watchy on what

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