The NPR Politics Podcast - 2017 Roundup: Thursday, December 28

Episode Date: December 28, 2017

The year that started with President Trump's inauguration and saw the firing of FBI director James Comey, the beginning of the Mueller probe, the rise of so-called fake news and alternative facts, and the Me Too movement is coming a close. This episode, host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Scott Horsley, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson and political editor Domenico Montanaro take stock of the top political stories of 2017. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Scott Detrow, host of the NPR Politics Podcast. We're doing a live show in D.C. on January 18th at the Warner Theater, and we'd love for you to be there. You can learn more and get tickets at nprpresents, all one word, dot org. Hi, this is Isidro taking a much needed break from Washington, D.C. by driving down beautiful Pacific Coast Highway in my home state of California. This podcast was recorded at 1240 on Thursday, December 28th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Keep up with the latest news by tuning in to your local NPR station or on the NPR One app. Now, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

And today, instead of our weekly roundup of political news, we're going to look back at the entire year. The biggest political stories in a year with so many political stories. I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute That I will faithfully execute. That I will faithfully execute. The office of President of the United States. The office of President of the United States.

This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe. It's my judgment that I was fired because of the Russia investigation. I was fired in some way to change, or the endeavor was to change the way the Russia investigation was being conducted. And of course, can't let it go. That was just to me. I know.

I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Horsley. I also cover the White House. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Horsley. I also cover the White House. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. All right, guys, this is our last podcast of 2017.

Heck of a year. Yeah, so like back in July, I ordered these shot glasses for everyone that we've all been using, I believe, that said, I survived the first six months of 2017. And I think we need new glassware. For sure. Because like we have now officially survived. The last six months of 2017. I mean, it's still Thursday, December 28th here.

I mean, you did the timestamp, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Just, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Just in case. Okay. So looking back on the year that was, it was this news tsunami. And Domenico, you were reflecting on this over the weekend around Christmas time.

Yeah. I think the technical term is bored. Yes. I think that may be the technical term, but you are not bored anymore. No one is bored because you have created a monster. Bit off way more than I could chew with this project. Yeah, so this is the bracket.

Yeah, so our top political story of the year. I was trying to figure out what we could do at NPR to just sort of rank the top political stories of the year, maybe talk about a few of them to go through. And there were just so many. I started listing them off last week and started surveying people around the office and friends and all that and saying like, OK, well, how many stories could we come up with and, you know, maybe sort of rank them or something. And I was up to about 32. And I thought, oh, 32 is a good number. Maybe I could do like a bracket out of it because I'm a

college basketball junkie. I mean, I've been doing college basketball brackets since I was eight years old. So I've always been somebody who sort of ranks and bracketizes things to just sort of see, okay, how do we say what's more important than something else or better or matches up differently with something else? For this, I started then listing out more stories off the top of my head. And I came up with like 78 or something. So there's a whole bunch that are left out. Is that like the wild card? What is it called in basketball?

The play-in games. Yes, the play-in games. There were some play-in games. For me, I wanted to create something like this just for fun. And it kind of got a little out of control. But Domenico, how do we pick a winner here? Because obviously in the NCAA, you play a basketball game. How do you pit two stories against one another? Well, these are all Twitter polls. So I did a call out-

Oh, totally scientific then. Nothing about this is scientific. I mean, this could be bodied, but you know- Voter fraud. Exactly. It could totally be voter fraud. But part of this is just get conversations started. It is interesting, too, to say, you know, with a year's perspective, to look back, some events which seem very big at the time kind of recede. Well, that didn't really amount to very much. Others, which maybe we didn't pay a whole lot of attention to at the time, turn out to have long lasting consequences.

And there were things I left off of here that I was I'd forgotten about. I was on KQED, our San Francisco Station. Someone asked about Standing Rock, for example. That happened this year, which I'd forgotten about, to be honest, and didn't put it on. And someone else jokingly said as a clickbait kind of thing, Covfefe would have been a sleeper, you know, and it made me think in a big, broader way. I forgot about Trump's Twitter feed. You know, some of these things he tweeted about, but I could have put that in. Yeah. Let's go through the bracket a little bit so that we can actually go through some of these stories. And there have been some interesting matchups. You had in one of the

rounds, Anthony Scaramucci, the one time communications director, 10 day communications director for the White House. Ironically, by the way, a 10 seed. I did not do that on purpose. I swear. But he was up against Charlottesville. Right. And sort of the white supremacist march in Charlottesville. Crazy thing. Anthony Scaramucci was like campaigning for himself in your bracket.

That's true. He got crushed by Charlottesville. So let's be clear. That was a far more serious story than his 10 days in the White House. His run in this tournament was very similar to his time in the White House, made a splash, but out very quickly. So, you know, he wound up winning in the first round against, I felt like, a far more serious story, obviously, the New York truck attack. But I think that there are certain things that are, you know, you wanted to see how would substance went out versus clickbait. And you could argue that he's kind of a clickbait sort of story.

Listen, in the arc of this year, which was long and may not have bent toward justice, Anthony Scaramucci was a moment of comic relief for me. See, there you go. Like nobody's business. Good feelings. And I needed that at that point this year. There was a day when he called in to CNN and he was just like on television for like a half an hour saying some of the most Anthony Scaramucci things he could possibly say. Unbelievable. I was late for work because I watched it so many times. All right.

Let's go through the bracket a bit more. We're going to, after a quick break, get to all of our top picks here in this room. But let's tick through a few more items on this bracket, Domenico. Got it. So these are some of the runners up, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. So what was a big upset here in the Sweet 16 is the Women's March actually defeated the Trump inauguration, which was a surprise because almost everything from this year sort of stems from the tree of Trump being inaugurated. But should have been a surprise because almost everything from this year sort of stems from the tree of Trump being inaugurated. But it should have been a surprise because the Women's March was a lot bigger than the Trump inauguration.

There you go. Bigger crowds. There was some American carnage there, I tell you. But speaking of the inauguration, that ties into another runner up in our list here, alternative facts, because those were sort of birthed on the day after the inauguration. Oh, that's true. When former Press Secretary Sean Spicer came into the press room and in his really his opening comments to the news media as the mouthpiece of the Trump administration said that Trump had, we heard the clip at the top of the podcast that this had been the largest inaugural crowd in history. Something which anyone with a pair of eyes could see was plainly false.

And then we had Kellyanne Conway say, well, that's just alternative facts, sort of setting the tone for what we've seen so often during this past year of the whole notion of objective reality being called into question. And the other big part of this, you could kind of bracket these other stories together thematically because Kerry Johnson is in here and a lot of these stories are on your beat. They are. It's been a hell of a year for legal news. Not over yet. You know, who knows what might happen on a Friday morning? We've had some bombshell news on Friday mornings this month alone. Was that only just this month? Only just this month. And, you know, we talked a little about this, but the year started after the inauguration, a week after the inauguration with the president signing the first travel ban, which prompted unrest at airports around the country, rounds of litigation, a second travel ban order, and then a third travel ban order. And we're not done yet. Everybody seems to think that's going to be heard by the Supreme Court maybe in 2018. Litigation ongoing on so many different fronts. So people

are voting now for the elite eight, which actually have to post the polling for it. So maybe I'll do that during some kind of break here. But we've got the the women's march at a four seed against undermining democratic institutions. A big theme because you had President Trump saying a lot of different things about whether it was the FBI, the judicial system, a free press. Fake news. So-called judges. So-called judges. So that's a four versus two seed that will take on the winner of the Mueller probe against Charlottesville. So make your news judgment there between those two stories. And then the overall number one seed fallout from sexual harassment, which has touched every industry, taking on number two alternative facts like we just talked about. And then the winner of

that will take on the other number one seed, Jim Comey being fired, which wound up leading to the Mueller probe against Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court. Perhaps a surprise, eking out a victory over the tax overhaul, the largest tax change in a generation. Big debate on that on Twitter, which was fun to watch. Gorsuch has been sort of the little engine that could here. Fifty one forty nine in49 in the last two rounds. He also was 51-49 over North Korea missile tests and Trump calling Kim Jong-un Rocket Man. All right, we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, our collaboration platform for the modern workforce.

Businesses across the globe count on GoToMeeting for simple, reliable online meetings anywhere from any device. With nearly 60 million frictionless meetings supported each year, GoToMeeting is where real work gets done. Learn more at GoToomeeting.com. All right, guys, we're back. And on this, our last podcast of 2017, we are looking back at the year that was and trying to pick our top stories of a lot of choices for this year. Carrie, do you want to go first? Yeah, mine is from May, the firing of FBI Director James Comey with about seven years left on his term as the FBI director. Now, after the election, I was told and I reported that the president-elect, Donald Trump, and some of his advisers were contemplating firing the FBI director, Jim Comey. It didn't happen. It didn't happen after the inauguration. It didn't happen weeks thereafter. It happened in a bombshell in May. And it led fairly directly to the appointment of a special prosecutor, Comey's predecessor at the FBI,

Robert Mueller, to investigate Russian interference in the election and whether Trump campaign aides had any ties to that and to the current unpleasantness and dark cloud that's been hanging over this White House ever since May. Yeah, I think there's something remarkable that's happened this year, which is, you know, the Russian interference in the election happened in 2016. But I think we didn't have any sense of how big it was until 2017. Yeah. And we still don't really fully understand. What we know is this. Seven months into this investigation by Robert Mueller, in which James Comey, by the way, fired FBI Director James Comey, is likely a witness. We have indictments against Paul Manafort,

Trump's former campaign chairman, Manafort's deputy, Rick Gates. They're fighting those charges. And guilty pleas by George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy aide, and guilty pleas also by Michael Flynn, the president's former national security advisor. Papadopoulos and Flynn are cooperating. We don't know what they've told Mueller or where Mueller's going next. And I think that Flynn is another one of those stories where, I mean, that happened in February that he was he was fired or resigned under pressure from the administration. And it was one of those days where we were just like, oh, my gosh, the news, the news just keeps coming. And I mean, the idea that a national security adviser would be forced out after only 25, 24 days on the job. That could be the story

of the year in any other year. And it was just one more data point at that time. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, Flynn has been quiet since his guilty plea. You know who hasn't been quiet? Jim Comey. Jim Comey has not been quiet at all. He took back his Twitter feed, or at least revealed that he... He fessed up to a Twitter feed he'd been operating under the name of a theologian and philosopher. And he has spawned a lot of merch, including this right here, this mug I have, which is a picture of James Comey and the words Comey's Homies. There are t-shirts, there are mugs, and you know what? There are also t-shirts, mugs, and hats that say it's homies. There are T-shirts, there are mugs, and you know what? There are also T-shirts, mugs, and hats that say it's Mueller time. Does Comey get a cut of this or is his likeness just being used there by somebody else for profit? This is a black bag operation. I do not think

that Comey has given his approval to the use of his image in this manner. But you know what? Comey also got a huge box book deal. And we're going to hear even more of image in this manner. But you know what? Comey also got a huge Bucks book deal. And we're going to hear even more of him in 2018 because he's going to be promoting his book on leadership. So what's he doing? Because his first tweet that he sent out, you know, fessing up was him staring down a long road in Iowa with sneakers on. You know, he has said to other people that he is not contemplating a

run for office. I'm not so sure about that, Domenico. I met Jim Comey 12, 15 years ago when he was the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. And even then, there was an aura around him of somebody who might aspire to elected office. And I'm not sure that he shut that door. So the other thing, I did wrestle with this. The other thing that I was thinking about picking was the relatively easy and speedy confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice this year, Neil Gorsuch, who immediately began making waves on the court. He's really talkative from the bench. He's interrupted some of his female colleagues. He's already made a difference in some five to four rulings.

And he's a young, young guy with many years left to go. It's not clear when the president, President Trump's going to get another pick to the court. The White House is writing itself for that operation. But in just having one guy on the bench over there, they have made a tremendous difference and satisfied their conservative base in a way that has made that base very happy this year. President Trump often points to the nomination and confirmation of Justice Gorsuch as one of his key accomplishments in this year. And it is certainly that, although I think this accomplishment really belongs to Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell more than it does to Donald Trump. It was McConnell who took the very unorthodox step in 2016 of preserving that vacancy after Antonin Scalia died and saying the next president will nominate this justice. That could have come back to bite the Republicans had Hillary Clinton won the election,

as lots of people thought she would. But in this case, McConnell's gamble paid off big time for the Republicans, and not just at the Supreme Court, but they preserved, the Senate Republicans preserved lots of vacancies at the lower federal courts. So when President Trump came into office, he had a lot of open running room to start filling those vacancies and he's been moving aggressively to do so. Yeah. In fact, this year, 12 circuit court nominees advanced and confirmed, which is a record in the first year of a presidency. Well, and again, mostly that's a testament to the spade work that McConnell did in keeping those seats open until Trump came in. is the first one who used the nuclear option to confirm a bunch of President Obama's judicial nominees, reducing the threshold from what had been a 60 vote threshold for a lot of these nominees

to just the simple majority 51 needed, which has allowed President Trump and Republicans in the Senate to confirm nominees who are more conservative and sort of have less bipartisan appeal than people who've been nominated in the past. They're conservative and they're also really young. People who have been in line to get some of these judgeships or people who've wanted to be in line have told me they've been advised that over a certain age, they will not be considered for a job because they're playing a long game here, the Republicans, and they want people to be on the bench for 20 or 30 years or potentially even longer. All right. I'm going to

go next. And Domenico, this was your number one seed in the bracket. Overall. Overall, your overall top pick. Well, I'm glad we agree. I do agree. And it is the sort of the me too sexual harassment awareness that has has risen up this year in a way that has been truly remarkable. And and this isn't purely a political story, but it has grown into this thing that has affected politics. You've had two House members resign. You've had a senator resign. And you've had people who are prominent members of media and entertainment and have been erased as a result of inappropriate behavior and conduct. Tam, you cover the White House. This is a White House issue in no small part, right? But at least part of the origin moment of this current reckoning that's happening is that President Trump, when he was a candidate, was accused by more than a dozen women of inappropriate sexual behavior. There was the Access Hollywood video and he won. And you look at the Women's March and and sort of that backlash.

Now, this moment was starting before President Trump. You had Bill Cosby. You had Bill Cosby. You had things at Fox News. Which feels so long ago now, right? And that was only in 2016, right? But there was this huge backlash after that that I think has had ripples throughout this year. What is interesting about this, and we've witnessed this in our own organization where we've had a couple of newsleaders who've been expelled from the company for these kinds of accusations. There is a real generational change, I think, among women in their willingness to tolerate things that older women were willing to tolerate. And that's probably a

healthy social change. But it's very interesting to watch women of different ages talk about these things and parse the degrees of offenses that they're willing to put up with and the things that they see as out of bounds. And we are really seeing a sea change in our culture. And I think it's not to attack the women who are making these accusations. It may still happen all too often around the country, but people are actually listening now. And that makes a big difference. And the political question here is, you know, in 1991, there was the Anita Hill hearing with Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court. She accused him of sexual harassment. And the hearing ended up with this panel of men sort of grilling her about sexual harassment. And it caused this huge backlash in the country. And women stood up and said,

you know what, I'm going to run for office. Let's make sure there isn't another hearing like that. And you ended up with what was known as the year of the woman in 1992, with all of these women running for Congress and especially in the Senate, just this wave of women coming in. What does 2018 look like? Is that going to be the year of the woman multiplied, magnify. Certainly the grounds have been laid for that because as our colleague Danielle Kersleben reported this week, there are record numbers of women who are throwing their hats in the ring. Yeah. All right. Scott Horsley, let's go to you. Well, mine is not necessarily a top seed in Domenico's bracket. I think I chose mine because to me it was was one of the most surprising developments of the year. And that is the resilience, the survivability of Obamacare.

I honestly believe that the fate of Obamacare was sealed last November when Donald Trump was elected president. You know, we had a Congress that had voted repeatedly to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and the only thing that had stopped that was a veto from Barack Obama. I thought once you had a Republican president, the Affordable Care Act would go out the window, if not on the first day that Donald Trump was sitting in the Oval Office, then certainly in the opening weeks of the administration. And we have certainly seen this administration try in every way they can to sabotage the Affordable Care Act. And yet it has survived. And just this month, we get news that nearly 9 million people signed up for coverage on the Obamacare exchanges in the most recent open enrollment period, nearly as many as last year, even though the marketing budget, even though the budget for assistance, even though the enrollment period itself had shrunk dramatically. What that tells me is that there really is a demand for the kind of insurance and subsidies that have survived. And we saw time and again, a Republican-dominated Congress unwilling to take the step to dismantle this program.

That to me was a big surprise. Well, they certainly tried and were not for John McCain's dramatic thumbs down. They very well may have repealed Obamacare and turned it into something else. You know, the big controversy for 2018 is whether or not they go back there because Paul Ryan has said that he wants to try. He wants to go after that, wants to go after welfare, wants to go after entitlements. Mitch McConnell, on the other hand, the man who is the majority leader in the Senate and controls the agenda, said he's willing to move on from health care. And remember, Paul- He seemed inclined to move on, in fact. Yeah. I mean, he said that that's what he wanted to do. You know, Scott, I have a question about

whether or not I chose the wrong language in my bracket because I wrote gutting Obamacare and maybe I should have said sabotage attempts on Obamacare. stripped away the tax penalty for not having insurance. That is a real blow to the Affordable Care Act, although it's probably not the fatal blow that the president has made it out to be. What it will do is it will raise premiums for everyone else, and it may limit the number of younger healthy people who are buying health insurance on the exchanges. But, of course, a lot of people who are buying insurance are getting subsidies from the government, so they're not fully exposed to the higher premiums. And again, we've seen nearly 9 million people sign up. So try as they might and try as they will continue to undermine the Affordable Care Act.

The Republicans haven't been able to end this program. Question. Are we still going to be calling this thing Obamacare next year, in two years? I think we're going to be calling it Obamacare for the foreseeable future. Because, you know, what began as a pejorative label has really become something that supporters of the program have rallied around. And it turns out there are quite a few of them, some of them with an R after their name. All right, Domenico, you go last. Hit and clean up to mix our sports metaphors terribly. Okay. Well, my alternative top stories would be then alternative facts and undermining democratic institutions. I'm taking liberty and throwing two of them out there because they're giant thematic things. Alternative facts. Everyone

knows that I sort of like to do fact checks and we have a whole fact checking thing that we've done here at NPR over the last couple of years. And, you know, the idea that the administration would tell repeated falsehoods from the president down to his press secretaries and not be shameable enough to change any of that based on facts that have been presented to them is really a huge, huge change, a huge shift, Republican or Democrat. And we're not sure what that means for democracy going forward. And that leads to sort of the other piece of this, the undermining democratic institutions, you know, because President Trump has taken remarkable steps to go out there and criticize pieces of a democracy that are really key in holding it up. He has said that the courts, you can't count on them to help us out, that they're a laughingstock. He said the FBI is tainted and has continuously

gone after them. And of course, you know, the free press, which is a staple of democracy, he's repeatedly called us fake, saying we're fake news. And fake news is a very serious thing that doesn't have to do with stories that you don't like. So those two, to me, really huge thematic pieces of 2017 we'd never seen before. Not just fake news. The president has called reporters an enemy of the people. And in response, partly in response, the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has announced that they have a record 27 ongoing criminal leak investigations at the Justice Department now. So maybe more to come next year. And of course, the Obama administration certainly stepped it up going after leakers as well. And, you know, having held over the heads of a lot of reporters, the potential for jail time. But this is a different level when you're calling people out by name. Yeah. And needless to say, it hasn't gone over very well at the Federal Bureau

of Investigation for the president to be calling the FBI in tatters. The president's lawyer and his allies have said, listen, Trump is just bothered by some people higher up in the FBI bureaucracy, not the rank and file. But Trump's comments have not been that targeted or specific. And it's undermining morale at the Bureau at a time when, you know, they're in charge of investigations into the New York truck attack, like you talked about, plots to bomb the fishermen's wharf in San Francisco over Christmas, and a whole bunch of national security investigations. And also, by the way, playing a role in the Russia investigation, which appears to be what the president's really bothered about. OK, we're going to take one more quick break.

And when we come back, can't let it go. radio station to help support this podcast and all of the work that NPR and public radio does. So the way to give is donate.npr.org slash politics. This is the final push. This campaign, or whatever we're calling it, ends at the end of the year. And there is this minor sort of maybe competition between all of the podcasts to see who can get the most people to follow their link and give to their local public radio station. And, you know, we want to win. So donate.npr.org slash politics. And one more thing. If you could, when you're done, go on social media and tell folks why you gave at hashtag Why Public Radio.

And thank you so much. OK, we are back. And as you know, we always end our Thursday shows with Can't Let It Go, where we all share one thing we cannot stop thinking about this week, politics or otherwise. And today we are going big. This is they can't let it go for the entire year of 2017. I'm going to go first. And I can't let go of the BBC dad. Oh, yeah.

So here he is. He is doing a hit with the BBC. He is providing serious analysis about the situation on the Korean Peninsula. The question is, how do democracies respond to those scandals? And what will it mean for the wider region? I think one of your children has just walked in. I mean, shifting sands in the region. I don't think tiptoeing, really. I would be surprised if they do.

And then another little kid comes scooting in on one of those little exorcisers. My apologies. Followed closely behind by her mother, who's grasping at the exorciser, desperately trying to intercept the child. Number two infiltrates the video. It's like media pro tip, right? Like the camera is on and like he tried to ignore the daughter and sort of like push her down, push her. Like nobody could see this.

Of course you can see it. Now, look, I mean, it's a tough moment. He's not somebody who does TV all the time. But it did make me think about our own potential, you know, BBC dad or mom moments that were possible on the radio. Because I often do another podcast here at NPR up first from my basement. And I do it from our attic. Very early in the morning.

And I almost had a moment like that this year because my daughter came bounding downstairs like a minute or two before we were about to go live and said, I want to play. And I said, no, you can't play with any toys. Like, you got to be really quiet if you want to stay. Like, you can't say anything. Right. So she sat on the couch completely silent for like 10 minutes. And then she pops up hearing what I had to say and goes, Daddy, why did that man try to kiss that girl? And it was like, whoa, this was about Al Franken. Oh, my gosh.

So me and my five-year-old daughter had to have this talk, you know, after that. And it was it's pretty amazing. But, yeah, you become very aware of your surroundings. I have to say we were in South Korea with the president in November. And in the in the press briefing room, they had a television set on and the same fellow was being interviewed from his home office because that's his expertise. He's a college professor, expert on the Korean Peninsula. And I sat there waiting, watching, waiting for his kids to come in the room. I paid no attention to anything he

was saying. No idea what the content was. All I wondered, is the kid going to come in the room? And the kid didn't. They fixed the lock on the door. It lost something. It was not as much fun. It's not the same. Carrie, what can't you let go of? Well, what the world needs now is love. Sweet love. And I mean it.

This was like a Ron Elving moment. And after weeks of trying to find a political connection, I have found one at last. The royal engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle has now hit politics because the British tabloids are reporting that Prince Harry has been warned not to invite the Obamas to his wedding next May, lest President Trump, who may not be invited, get aggravated and retaliate in some fashion against Theresa May. And so Harry, in an interview this week with the BBC, said he has not yet made a guest list. No one's on or off. But he did not commit to not inviting former President Obama. If he does, oh my goodness, I think one of us has to go to cover that.

And I'm raising my hand now to say it should be me. I thought it was funny too. This week, we got to hear the radio interview that Prince Harry did with former President Obama. It was recorded a few months ago when they were together at the Invictus Games. But in sort of a lightning round, Prince Harry was asking the president a whole series of lightning questions, one of which,

which TV show do you like better, Suits or The Good Wife? Suits, which stars his wife- His fiancee. To be, maybe more. Which no one has almost ever heard of. It's on the USA network, right? But the always diplomatic former president said suits. Is that part of alternative facts this year? It might be.

He was also asked Harry or William, and he said William. For now. For now. Speaking of William, William says, with respect to Harry's impending nuptials, that he is excited that Harry will no longer scrounge in William's refrigerator in the middle of the night. So somebody send some like fruitcake or snacks to Prince Harry. They're just like a Harry and David basket. That's right. That sounds like a Harry and William basket. It sounds like some air in a spare shade right there. It's rough. It's rough to be a sibling. Yeah. Scott Horsley. So on Christmas

Day, President Trump tweeted, I hope everyone's having a great Christmas. Then tomorrow it's back to work. And the day after Christmas, he was back at work on his golf course. And the day after that, and the day after that, by the latest count, he has spent 87 days at one of his golf courses. That's one out of four days he's been in office. And the White House was very upset because on Tuesday, a CNN camera managed to get some footage of the president golfing. So on Wednesday, somehow it happened that a great big box truck was parked in such a way as to block the view of the cameras onto the golf course. And that reminded me of what I can't let go from this year, which is that my favorite video of the whole year, it was the implosion of the Georgia Dome. And the poor cameraman from the Weather Channel had set up hours ahead of time in the perfect location.

And just as the charges go off, the bus pulls up. And you hear this poor cameraman. No bus. No. No. And then the bus moves away and there's nothing left. There's nothing left. It's a great shot.

Domenica, what can I let go of this and didn't really think about it for a long time until I saw our end of year analytics for the most viewed political stories of the year. And now I can't let it go because I can't believe this was the most viewed political story. And I know Scott Horsley likes to do drum rolls. So the most viewed political story of the year was President Obama awarding Joe Biden the Medal of Freedom, which was stunning to me that that was the story. And I remember having a conversation here about whether or not we would even post a story on this. And we did like a watch live and we're like, well, we'll see how it goes. And it just it blew up and people seem to want to, you know, really see this moment. And you saw President Obama award this to Vice President Biden and you saw him tear up. And remember, this was months after his son had died. And, you know, still a lot of goodwill toward the vice president, given that the bromance is real. All right, that is a wrap for us this week. And this year,

we will be back in your feeds early next year, which it turns out is also early next week. Until then, you can keep up with our coverage on NPR.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. Also, one of us is always on Up First every weekday morning. And in these last couple of days of 2017, please consider supporting us by donating to your local public radio station and tell them that we sent you. You can do that by going to donate.npr.org slash politics. And then tell everyone what you did and why you did it with the hashtag WhyPublicRadio. We love hearing those stories. And thank you so much for another year in politics.

I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Horsley. I also cover the White House. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.