Happy holidays, Donald Trump
Some things Donald Trump says enrage me, while others get under my skin. The pronouncement that does both is his regular claim that until he prevailed, Americans were not free to say “merry Christmas” to each other.
He was at it again last week in West Allis, Wis., during his Watch-Me-Divide-The-Country-Further Victory Tour. Trump declared: “So when I started 18 months ago, I told my first crowd in Wisconsin that we are going to come back here someday and we are going to say merry Christmas again. Merry Christmas. So, merry Christmas everyone.”
Here’s what bothers me: Long before Trump came along we were entirely free to say “merry Christmas” to each other. Our political leaders could say it, too.
On her MSNBC program last weekend, my friend Joy Reid demonstrated that President Obama was no Christmas-hating guy trying to hide remembrances of the birth of Jesus Christ behind some noxious wall of secularism. She showed not one but 20 moments when the president said the words “merry Christmas.”
As for me, I’ve never felt the least reluctant to say “merry Christmas” — as long as I know the person I’m talking to is a Christian who observes the holiday.
And there’s the rub. We all know that Trump has simply picked up the “war on Christmas” theme driven annually by conservative media. Like so much else these days, this “issue” divides us along partisan lines. A PRRI survey released this week found that Republicans, by more than 2 to 1, want stores and businesses to greet customers with “Merry Christmas.” Democrats, by a similar margin, prefer them to say “Happy holidays.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/happy-holidays-donald-trump/2016/12/21/74abefa8-c788-11e6-8bee-54e800ef2a63_story.html?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_1_na&utm_term=.d9e7e16ff443
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Last edited Thu Dec 22, 2016, 06:32 PM - Edit history (1)
