Halloween is still more than a week away, but Donald Trump on Monday fired an unexpected salvo in the War on Christmas.
Toward the end of a speech in North Carolina, Trump began to hit on a litany of right-wing grievances. In the space of less than a minute, Trump attacked critical race theory, transgender youths, and migrants.
And smack in the middle of that minute, he announced: “And we will proudly say ‘merry Christmas’ again.”
Trump and others on the right, especially on Fox News, have falsely insisted that Democrats are trying to do away with Christmas and trying to replace “merry Christmas” with “happy holidays.”
Eric Trump, a son of Donald Trump, made that argument on Monday with his own out-of-season Christmas message on Newsmax.
“You had a cognizant effort to get rid of the word ‘Christmas.’ I mean they were calling it a ‘holiday tree’ during the Obama administration,” he lied. “It wasn’t until my father came in and said, ‘listen, we’re gonna call it a Christmas tree because we celebrate Christmas as a nation.’”
“Merry Christmas” hasn’t gone anywhere.
The Obamas said “merry Christmas” frequently. So have the Bidens. And Vice President Kamala Harris has also has said “merry Christmas” plenty of times, including just last year in a holiday greeting on X.
The Trumps, on the other hand, have a decidedly mixed record on the holiday, with former first lady Melania Trump infamously caught on tape complaining about having to arrange the White House decorations.
“I’m working like a, my ass off at Christmas stuff,” she said in leaked recordings released by former friend and aide Stephanie Winston Wolkoff in 2020. “You know, who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration, but I need to do it, right?”
Trump’s critics were puzzled by his premature Christmas message:
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