Despite what you might still hear over on Fox News, the “War on Christmas” is apparently over. And Americans have Donald Trump to thank.
During a deeply bizarre sit-down with Mike Huckabee for a Christmas special from Mar-a-Lago, set to air Thursday night on Newsmax, the former president eagerly took credit for bringing back the phrase “Merry Christmas” and banishing the dreaded “Happy Holidays” once and for all.
“America had gone through a long period where people quit saying ‘Merry Christmas.’ It was all ‘Happy Holidays.’ You deliberately changed that!” Huckabee told Trump as treacly music played in the background.
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Without skipping a beat, Trump replied that he made the issue part of his campaign to push back against the “woke” forces who had made it “embarrassing” for stores to use the phrase “Merry Christmas.”
“When I started campaigning, I said you’re going to say ‘Merry Christmas’ again, and now people are saying it,” Trump added before veering off on a tangent (naturally) about how the names “George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson” are “being obliterated because of craziness.”
“But they are saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again,” he continued. “I would say it all the time during that period, that we want them to say ‘Merry Christmas.’ Don’t shop at stores that don’t say ‘Merry Christmas’ and I’ll tell you, we brought it back very quickly.”
“You really did,” Huckabee agreed, as footage of what appeared to be the Mar-a-Lago Christmas tree, complete with American flag and “Be Best” ornaments, played on-screen.
To really bring his point home, Trump said: “Whether you’re Muslim, whether you’re Christian, whether you’re Jewish, everyone loves Christmas. And they say ‘Merry Christmas’—until these crazy people came along and they wanted to stop it along with everything else.”
And yet, ironically, even Newsmax decided to call its own company gathering this year—for which all attendees had to be vaccinated—a “Holiday Reception.” So it seems the war lives on.
