At least he didn’t murder any animals.
That was the holiday message from Mike Huckabee when he joined Fox & Friends the morning after Christmas to defend President Trump, who he claims “can’t catch a break.”
“It wasn’t like he was boiling the little girl’s bunny rabbit in a pot on the stove or something,” the former Arkansas governor, whose sons once killed a dog at summer camp, said.
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Huckabee and the hosts of the president’s favorite morning show defended Trump’s latest jaw-dropper, in which he suggested to an unsuspecting child that she’d better wise up about Santa Claus (spoiler alert: He may not exist).
On Christmas Eve, to the surprise of families who phoned in to the NORAD “Santa tracker,” Donald and Melania Trump picked up several calls from children. On one, the president—who is a grandfather to nine—asked a young girl named Collman if she still believed in Santa Claus “because at 7, it’s marginal, right?”
On Wednesday morning, Huckabee—the father of Trump’s press secretary—said the media was to blame for the ensuing public outrage.
“What is wrong with people?” he exclaimed. “It wasn’t like he was boiling the little girl’s bunny rabbit in a pot on the stove or something. I mean, he asked a simple question. You never can find a way that President Trump will make some of the people in the press happy.”
“It doesn’t matter what he does,” said Huckabee, just days after the federal government shut down over the president’s desire to fund a multibillion-dollar wall along the Mexico border. “If he didn’t make the call, if he didn’t talk to the little girl, they would say he was curled up in a fetal position in the White House and was unwilling to come out and talk to anybody.”
“I mean, the man can’t catch a break,” he added.
In response to the roasting, the girl’s parents reportedly put out a statement clarifying that they weren’t bothered by Trump’s question.
For their parts, the B-team holiday hosts—Todd Piro, Katie Pavlich, and Griff Jenkins—agreed with Huckabee, even citing a Daily Beast headline as evidence that the “mainstream media” had a “freakout” over the phone call.
“This was a six-minute long phone call with the president of the United States on Christmas Eve,” said Pavlich. “I thought that was a long time for a phone call from the president.”
“Was it perfectly artful? Probably not,” Piro contributed. “At the end of the day, can we have just one day when we just have fun? No harm, no foul.”
“He literally can do no right,” Piro said.
