Merry Politicized Christmas

Can the Trump Christmas ornament save America?

Whenever I’m feeling cheerless and alone in this world, I always look forward to the 10 or 12 emails I receive per day from the Trump administration to keep me company. It’s like a message in a bottle. A letter from another time. “But it hasn’t been the Trump ‘administration’ since January,” you say.  Shhhhh! Please don’t tell Mr. Trump that – he still thinks he’s president. And I don’t wish to fill his Christmas stocking with coal. Not that coal isn’t an amazing, fantastic fossil fuel.  A tremendous fossil fuel, really.

It’s unclear - unless I read the fine print - where the emails come from, since there are so many incoming from Trumpy sources, PACs, and shell accounts presumably run by room-temperature-IQ relatives and sticky-fingered hangers-on. It might be an official statement from the (exiled) POTUS himself. I just counted, and I’ve received literally 17 of those since December 1. After that hippie beardo Jack Dorsey removed him from Twitter (which was like cutting Samson’s hair, the source of Trump’s strength), and after Trump’s post-presidential and short-lived blog sputtered to a halt (with no invitation forthcoming to join Glenn Greenwald’s Substack as a paid contributor), Trump took to “tweeting” via email. And I am a recipient. Every day. Seemingly all day. I’m a sentimentalist by nature, but it’s hard to miss a guy who never leaves.

The emails don’t just come from the Office of the 45th President of the United States  (not the “former” president, it’s worth noting, even though there is now, technically, a 46th). They come from orgs like the Save America joint fundraising committee, or the Make America Great Again PAC, or the Americans Make Great Safes C-3PO (it’s all kind of a word-scramble blur).

Just yesterday, I received my favorite so far -  a Christmas-season gift arrived from the “Trump Christmas Store,” which is probably just a cutout for the Save American Safes From Greatness 501-BR549. On offer was a free red-hat-shaped “Trump Save America” Christmas ornament. Or it would be “free,” so long as I contributed a minimum of $75. Which is technically about 45 bucks more than I’d pay for the damn thing if I just bought it at Trumpshop.net. Not to mention $50 more than the Trump gold-bar paperweight stocking stuffer or $47 more than the Trump Las Vegas Christmas ornament (both available at trumpstore.com). The latter, according to the site copy, is “dazzling in gold embroidery……representing Trump Las Vegas and it’s {sic} beautiful architecture, the TRUMP sign is displayed on the top of the ornament, similar to the real building.”  It’s tacky enough to do a Dubai sheikh proud, or would be, if Dubai sheiks weren’t Muslim and active participants in the War on Christmas – or the Jihad on Christmas, if you prefer.

But back to the “Trump Save America” red-hat ornament – the email doesn’t specify what precisely America is getting saved from. Malaise? High inflation? A president’s supporters invading the Capitol to intimidate Congress and beat up cops while trying to overturn democracy? Some things are better left unsaid, perhaps. But what is said is that time is of the essence, because “President Trump REALLY wants you to have one of our beautiful Christmas ornaments, Matt Labash.”

When I click through, I am transported to a page with the amazing, fantastic, tremendous Trump Save America ornament hanging from a tree with shimmering Christmas lights. Though the ad copy belies the tranquil holiday setting, speeding me along in hurried italics: This one-time offer for a FREE ornament is available to you for ONE HOUR, so don’t wait.  In case I didn’t get the message, a one-hour countdown clock is slapped on me, trying to force me into an impulse buy. Of course, like many things in Trump World, it’s fake. If you leave the page and come back, the clock starts over. Much like Trump tried to start the clock over on his presidency even after he lost the electoral college and the popular vote.

In fairness to Mr. Trump, due to the general blandness of his successor, one struggles to visualize what a Sleepy Joe ornament would even look like. (A manger? A bottle of Ativan?) And Trump’s isn’t the worst Christmas ornament I’ve ever encountered. Years ago, in another journalism life, I did a short investigative essay on bad Christmas ornaments. (I wasn’t exactly working the Bob Woodward beat.)

I don’t mean the kind your child makes for you in school – the crèche ornament constructed of elbow macaroni and gloppy Elmer’s glue. (“We’ll hang this one on the bare spot on the back of the tree,” you tell your little angel.) No, these were professionally-made awful Christmas ornaments. There was the scatological “Yule Doo” ornament, which resembled something Prancer would leave behind if Santa fed him too much table food. And the Yuengling Black & Tan beer-can ornament, which suggests a good New Year’s resolution might be to send mommy off to Hazelden. There was a Dick Cheney “F--- Off” ornament, and the Matthew Shepard bulb with “Matt” embossed on it in festive red lettering. The website selling it suggested it would be good to explain it to “very young children” by gathering them around the Christmas tree, while telling them, “When Matt was in college, he was robbed and beaten to death because he was different than most men.”  Now off to bed, so those sugar-plum visions can dance in your head!

Perhaps the very worst was the “Merry Christmas From Heaven From Deceased in Pewter” ornament. Purportedly “heaven-sent” by your recently deceased loved one, it was engraved: I love you dearly/ Now don’t shed a tear/ I’m spending my Christmas/ With Jesus This Year. I’m a God-fearing Christian who likes Christmas as much as the next gal, but that briefly had me considering atheism.

I did a check, and since my groundbreaking tasteless-Christmas-ornament journalism, there have been some new entries. For instance, nothing says “ho-ho-heil” like swastika bulbs. Or there’s the bottle-of-Ranch-Dressing ornament, in case your tree doesn’t feel complete without dippin’ sauce. Then there’s the one with a picture of the late Jeffrey Epstein’s face on it. (Inscription: “This ornament didn’t hang itself.”)

We have long politicized Christmas, of course. Back when he was still tweeting, Trump himself regularly did so.  When he wasn’t plugging his Christmas crap (“My fragrance ‘Success’ is flying off the shelves @Macys. The perfect Christmas gift!” he once wrote), there were tweets like this one from Christmas day, 2018: “I hope everyone, even the Fake News media, is having a great Christmas!” And then, the day after Christmas in 2013, he wrote, “O.K., Christmas is over, now we can all go back to the wars of life. Focus, focus, focus – never accept defeat – push hard for total victory.”

As if anyone gets discharged from the political “wars of life” these days.

No, politics have now infiltrated and ruined Christmas just about as much as they have everything else, from sports to church to family dinners. This season, everyone is manning their predictable battle stations as congressposeurs Lauren Boebert and Thomas Massie have released family pictures around their Christmas tree with all their children holding guns. (In Massie’s case, the day after a Michigan school shooting.) Because anyone who has read the biblical Christmas story (or who has seen A Charlie Brown Christmas) knows that Christ came to bring peace on earth and goodwill toward men with semi-automatic weapons.

For close to two decades now, Fox News wheels out their hardy perennial “War on Christmas” stories, some real (the godless Baal-worshippers at the ACLU trying to scrub the Christ out of Christmas in the public square on many occasions), some imagined (if Fox hasn’t noticed, retail stores seem to start celebrating Jesus’ birthday right after Labor Day, these days). But even paranoids have real enemies. And Fox certainly does, too.

Fox Christmas tree roasting over an open fire

Two days ago, a homeless man climbed up inside the giant artificial tree right outside Fox HQ, packed it with newspapers, and set it afire, watching it burn. No word, as of this writing, on whether he was just deranged or an MSNBC watcher. Who knows? He might not even own a TV. But Fox has vowed to build the tree back better. Because, of course, a tree is not just a tree. As Ainsley Earhardt on Fox & Friends put it: “It’s a tree that unites us. It brings us together. It’s about the Christmas spirit. It is about the holiday season. It’s about Jesus. It’s about Hanukkah. It is about everything that we stand for as a country.”

Not so sure about that Hanukkah bit, but we’ll just chalk that up to the fog of Christmas War. Throwing another yule log on the fire:  it won’t help matters, of course, that the alleged arsonist, who has a considerable criminal rap sheet, was already released without bail, according to the New York Post, which is housed in the same midtown building as Fox.  It’s par for the course in useless Mayor Bill de Blasio’s newly-lawless New York, where murders and shootings have essentially doubled since 2019.

So maybe we do need to save America, as Trump’s Christmas ornament suggests. Though I’m unconvinced we’ll do so by politicizing our Christmas trees, while celebrating the guy who tried to overthrow his own government.  But these are the choices nowadays – bad-faith conservatives burning the country down figuratively, bad-faith liberals doing it literally.

Me? I’m keeping my Christmas tree apolitical. My choice is to go with the more tastefully tasteless. Which is why I’m sticking with the Sweet Jesus gingerbread ornament.

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Bonus track: Here is my very favorite Christmas song of the last few years, “Alone on Christmas Day,” by Phoenix. It comes from the great Sofia Coppola-directed 2015 Bill Murray Christmas special, appropriately titled A Very Murray Christmas. (My family watches it together every year.)  Coppola is married to the band’s lead singer, Thomas Mars. And the band plays French chefs at the Carlyle Hotel in the film. Also visible in this song: Bill Murray on backing vocals, Paul Shaffer on piano, Jason Schwartzman (Coppola’s cousin) on drums, and Buster Poindexter behind the bar on cocktail shaker.