A flurry of Senate confirmation hearings for Trump’s Cabinet picks, beginning Tuesday, will exemplify the president-elect’s aggressive efforts to wield swift and consequential power after taking the oath of office on January 20. Trump will also make fresh efforts this week to nail down the strategy to push his sweeping agenda of disruption through the narrowly divided House and Senate before he launches a weekend of celebrations ahead of the inauguration.

Biden, 82, will deliver his farewell speech from the Oval Office on Wednesday in his first such address since he told Americans he wouldn’t run for reelection in July after a disastrous debate laid bare his diminished capacity. The outgoing administration is still hoping for a deal that would free US and Israeli hostages in Gaza, and Biden is also pushing the Taliban for the release of three Americans the US considers unjustly held in Afghanistan.

The president is also still considering whether to grant preemptive pardons to people whom the White House believes may be targets of the next president’s retribution, such as former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the president-elect’s most prominent GOP critics. Biden said Friday he was watching Trump’s rhetoric to try to assess his intentions, at a time when the departing president is using his appearances to try to fashion last-minute adjustments to how he will be remembered in history.

An already tense transition, given the brittle personal relationship between Trump and Biden, will be further overshadowed by the disastrous wildfires that have destroyed thousands of homes in the Los Angeles area and killed at least 24 people

When the sun falls from the darkening Washington, DC, sky, the electric crowd at Howard University appears certain it will rise brighter. Singing, cheering, linking arms and raising hands in the great outdoor quadrangle known as The Yard, they have come by the thousands to watch the election returns and witness history in a place where it has been made before.

The historically Black university has produced legendary authors and actors, esteemed scientists, the titanic Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and the groundbreaking woman for whom the rapturous throngs have rallied tonight.

“And every time we hear a mention of Kamala Harris winning another state this crowd goes crazy!” a local television reporter says to her camera.

Academically, every soul here knows the vice president could lose. But in the way of true believers in every political campaign, they feel she is destined to win; that the polls will clang shut east to west and acclaim will echo back from the far ocean, across the Rockies and Plains, through the farms and industrial towns to the nation’s capital, where their candidate will become the first woman elected president of the United States.

Her whole campaign, after all, has been like a movie, and that’s how movies end. The fact that Harris — a Black and Asian American woman — will crush the man many Democrats see as dismissive of women and non-Whites, former President Donald Trump, is a delicious detail they will savor all their lives.

The new year in politics starts with the bang of a billionaire with a bigger mouth than his bank balance.
Elon Musk has been lobbing almost as many digital darts over the Atlantic as Luke Littler has the real things in the last couple of days.
The world’s richest man has been sounding off in the strongest possible terms about the prime minister for almost as long as Sir Keir Starmer has been in Downing Street.
In recent days, the focus has been on child sexual exploitation and Musk’s allegation that the prime minister was “complicit in the rape of Britain” when he was Director of Public Prosecutions by failing to deal with the scandal.
I’m told Sir Keir “will not want to get into a food fight with Musk” but will make a robust defence of his time as chief prosecutor.
He is also keen to emphasise the importance of political debate being grounded in verifiable facts and that Musk is making claims that are “blatantly untrue” as one source put it.
Sources point, for instance, to those defending the Prime Minister’s record as DPP, including another former senior prosecutor who took to X – the social media platform Musk owns – to say Sir Keir oversaw a record number of child abuse convictions.
Those in government also point to the local inquiries there have been into the abuse and rape of vulnerable young girls by groups of men mainly of Pakistani descent – and the national inquiry conducted by Professor Alexis Jay.
The Conservatives, Reform and Elon Musk have each expressed varying degrees of outrage in recent days that the government has said no to a public inquiry into the scandal.
But few expected this weekend’s twist: that within hours of the Reform leader Nigel Farage describing Musk as a “hero” who “makes us look cool,” the X owner said Reform needed a new leader as Farage “doesn’t have what it takes”.