- Former president Donald Trump claimed credit for the phrase "Merry Christmas" still being in use.
- Trump said he pushed back against "woke" forces that made it "embarrassing" to say "Merry
Christmas." - He added that by saying "Merry Christmas" more often, he fought off "crazy people" who wanted to cancel the greeting.
Former President Donald Trump claimed on Thursday that Americans have him to thank for them still being able to say "Merry Christmas."
In a sit-down interview on Newsmax with Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, Trump said the greeting only came back because he fought for it.
Huckabee, who ran for president against Trump in 2016, suggested that for a "long period," people had "quit saying 'Merry Christmas.'"
"It was all 'Happy Holidays.' You deliberately changed that and openly said, 'Merry Christmas,' we're going to say it again," Huckabee said.
"That was part of my campaign. The country had started with this 'woke,' I guess, a little bit before that. And it was embarrassing for stores to say 'Merry Christmas,'" Trump replied. "You'd 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.'"
"When I started campaigning, I said: 'You're going to say Merry Christmas again.' And now people are saying it," Trump said.
Trump added, at that point, that there were other names like "George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson" that were "being obliterated because of craziness."
"But they are saying 'Merry Christmas' again. That was a big part of what I was doing. I would say it all the time during that period, that we want them to say 'Merry Christmas,'" Trump said. "Don't shop at stores that don't say 'Merry Christmas,' and I'll tell you, we brought it back very quickly."
"America loves Christmas. Whether you're Muslim, whether you're Christian, whether you're Jewish, everyone loves Christmas," the former president added. "And they say 'Merry Christmas' — until these crazy people came along, and they wanted to stop it along with everything else."
The narrative that there is a "war on Christmas" has been repeatedly echoed by conservatives after Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly first floated it in 2004. O'Reilly suggested that Christmas was under siege from department stores supposedly switching their staffs' greetings from "Merry Christmas" to "Happy Holidays."
More recently, Starbucks' decision around whether to explicitly wish customers "Merry Christmas" became a conservative talking point, with media outlets including Fox News and Breitbart accusing the company of waging a "war on Christmas" because of its decision to remove Christmas-specific greetings from its holiday merchandise.
