Donald Trump on Sunday suggested that President-elect Biden’s new administration would attempt to prevent people from using the word “Christmas.”
Speaking to supporters at a rally on Saturday, the president wished the audience a “merry Christmas” before appearing to suggest that the incoming administration would try to “take that word again out of the vocabulary.”
“Let me begin by wishing you all a merry Christmas – remember the word,” the president told a rally at Voldosta, Georgia, during which he repeated unsubtantiated claims that the election had been rigged against him.
“Remember we started five years ago and I said, ‘you’re going to be saying Christmas again.’ We say it proudly again. Although they’ll be trying to take that word again out of the vocabulary. We’re not going to let them do that.”
It was a return to a theme that has occupied President Trump during his political career.
Eric Trump said in a 2016 interview that his father was motivated to run for president in office partly because of the false claim that the White House Christmas tree had been renamed “the holiday tree.”
“He opens up the paper each morning and sees our nation’s leaders giving a hundred billion dollars to Iran, or he opens the paper and some new school district has just eliminated the ability for its students to say the pledge of allegiance, or some fire department in some town is ordered by the mayor to no longer fly the American flag on the back of a fire truck,” Eric Trump said in 2016, in an interview with James Robinson that was cited by Buzzfeed.
“Or he sees the tree on the White House lawn has been renamed ‘holiday tree’ instead of ‘Christmas tree,'” continued Trump. “I could go on and on for hours. Those are the very things that made my father run, and those are the very things he cares about.”
He suggested during his presidential run in 2016 that the Democratic leadership under President Obama was “selling Christianity down the tubes” in a speech in which he pledged to make department stores use the words “Merry Christmas” in promotional materials.
Trump has previously wrongly sought to claim credit for re-introducing the Americans’ right to say “Merry Christmas” during his time in office.
“Do you remember they were trying to take Christmas out of Christmas? Do you remember? They didn’t want to let you say ‘Merry Christmas,'” he told an audience in 2017, during a speech which was cited by Rolling Stone.
“You’d go around, you’d see department stores that have everything red, snow, beautiful, ribbons, bows. Everything was there but they wouldn’t say ‘Merry Christmas.’
“They’re all saying Merry Christmas again, you remember? I went through that during the campaign: ‘They’re going to say Merry Christmas again.’ And they are,” he said.
*story by Business Insider