There’s a lot of premature celebration going on in Republican circles these days, from excitement over the stock market spike and the Trump-Pence intervention to save a few hundred jobs in Indiana to the pending regulatory and legislative destruction of the Obama legacy, assuming the GOP can get its act together on little things like how to replace Obamacare.
But far and away the most fatuous attaboys being bruited about involve Trump’s alleged banishment of the terrible scourge of the War on Christmas.
You remember the War on Christmas, I am sure, and recall the terrible martyrdom being suffered by followers of the Baby Jesus who have been scandalized by department stores displaying “Happy Holidays” signs and government agencies insisting on being inclusive towards non-Christians in extending best wishes for the season. Trump promised to end the horror if he became president, and as with so many of his magical pledges, he hasn’t even had to take the oath of office to work wonders:
“You can say again ‘merry Christmas’ because Donald Trump is now [sic] the president,” Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager, said on “Hannity” Tuesday evening. “You can say it again. It’s OK to say.”
Trump himself seems to think saying it over and over has the power of an incantation:
“The word Christmas,” Trump said on the campaign trail last September at the Values Voter Summit. “I love Christmas. I love Christmas. You go to stores, you don’t see the word Christmas. It says happy holidays all over. I say, ‘Where’s Christmas?’ I tell my wife, ‘Don’t go to those stores.’”
“I want to see Christmas. I want to see Christmas.’”
And so it is apparently “safe” for Christians to be rude to their Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or nonreligious friends and colleagues by regaling them with sectarian holiday greetings. The war on common courtesy has apparently been subordinated to the war on “political correctness.”
