Donald Trump has made a tradition of calling children across the nation on Christmas night to have a televised fun, quippy, quick exchange with kids about Santa. But the latest one was just far too odd and bizarre for anyone to chuckle.
Before the obligatory accusation by the MAGA faithful that criticizing the president for making jokes is another severe case of “TDS,” the issue here is not that he was inappropriate or anything like that. And truth be told, one of Trump’s few redeeming qualities for his critics is that the president has a few good jokes in him here and there.
At the very least, Trump can make people laugh more consistently than any of his comedian supporters. After all, there’s only so many times one can sit through Tim Allen sitcoms about the grumpy dad who turns out to be lovable deep down. Trump’s humor, by contrast, isn’t planned. It’s instinctual. He makes people laugh through sheer absurdity — whether he’s talking about Elon Musk being on Ozempic or simply existing with a hairstyle everyone somehow learned to accept.
In fact, to extend some rope to Trump, he has been funny before during these calls. But again, just incidentally. When he had a 7 year old on the line and the president telling the child who probably still struggles with spelling that at his age believing in Santa should be “marginal” is comedy gold. It’s the type of thing SNL writers wrack their brains all night long to come up with.
Donald Trump, answering phone call from 7-year-old on Christmas Eve: "Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at seven it's marginal, right?" pic.twitter.com/VHexvFSbQ1
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 25, 2018
Where Trump’s humor struggles to translate, oddly enough, is when he’s actually trying to be funny. He has the timing, but he’s too choreographed and insincere that you can’t find the truth in his jokes.
According to CNN, on Christmas Day at Palm Beach, Trump was calling kids as is now tradition to check in on them and their relationship with Santa. His first caller was Jasper from Oklahoma — he’s just 10. Jasper, as you could imagine with most “marginal” Santa believers, just wanted to talk about the guy who brings him presents.
Trump instead responded, “We want to make sure that he’s not infiltrated, that we’re not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa. So we found out that Santa is good. Santa loves you. Santa loves Oklahoma, like I do. You know Oklahoma was very good to me in the election. So I love Oklahoma. Don’t ever leave Oklahoma, okay?” Jasper — probably not understanding a thing that was just said — was silent for a while and just said “okay” and hung up the phone.
Another child, Amelia, was expressing to the president her anxieties about finding coal in her stocking. To that Trump responded, “You mean clean, beautiful coal?” Which is so absurd it might have actually made a few people chuckle.
All in all, 10 year old kids and under are probably not the people you’d wanna use to push political agendas with. They just want to be kids and talk about the Millennium Falcon Lego set they just got. Or maybe the president should have just pushed in an old dad joke in there about “6 7” — this is not rocket science.
