Former President Trump is claiming victory in the so-called “war on Christmas” — and says even Jews and Muslims are joining in the spirit.
The ex-president took credit for bringing back “Merry Christmas” and dumping the more universalist phrase “Happy Holidays” that he said was sweeping the nation before his MAGA movement hit the scene.
“When I started campaigning, I said: ‘You’re going to say ‘Merry Christmas’ again, and now people are saying it,’” Trump said Thursday in a Christmas interview on the far right-wing Newsmax network.
“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.”
“I’ll tell you: ‘We brought it back very quickly,” he added.
The remarks came in a Christmas-themed interview with Mike Huckabee, the onetime conservative Republican presidential candidate. The former president spoke from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, which was decked out with a tree trimmed with ex-First Lady Melania Trump’s “Be Best” ornaments.
Trump blasted so-called “woke” liberals for making it all but verboten for stores and other businesses to use the words “Merry Christmas.”
“It was embarrassing for stores to say, “Merry Christmas,”’ Trump said. ‘You see these big chains. They want your money, but they don’t want to say, “Merry Christmas,” and they’d use reds and they’d use whites and snow, but they wouldn’t say Christmas.’”
According to a survey released by the Pew Research Center this week, the number of Americans who are not affiliated with organized religion — commonly known as the “nones” — now constitutes 29% of adults. That’s up from 23% in 2016 and 19% in 2011.
“If the unaffiliated were a religion, they’d be the largest religious group in the United States,” said Elizabeth Drescher, an adjunct professor at Santa Clara University who wrote a book about the spiritual lives of people who don’t practice a particular faith.
Trump swept aside those concerns, insisting that even non-believers actually love to get in the yuletide spirit.
“Whether you’re Muslim, whether you’re Christian, whether you’re Jewish, everyone loves Christmas,” he said. “And they (said) ‘Merry Christmas’—until these crazy people came along and they wanted to stop it along with everything else.”
