A holiday "card" from Aggie, my old student. She was such a nice young lady before she joined the army, went to Afghanistan as a combat medic!
Don't want to turn our kids into Aggies? Don't send them to war! Isn't that what celebrating the Prince of Peace is all about? Isn't that the triumph of light over darkness?
Actually, she's a damned fine human being. PTS just gives us a different slant on things.
Hallelujah!
************
And happy whatever from Bodie, six months old on the 26th, about 50 lbs. With the three Lambchop dog chewies he got a week ago, all chewed to pieces by now.
A little note to my tribe: (You are ALL part of that -- we have shared something extraordinary together, and you have brought all kinds of different, and thought-provoking stuff to the table). I have learned a motto: "You never know!" An old friend sent a snowy pic from his country place in New York with thanks to Irving Berlin. I was reminded of a pic taken yesterday from my driveway by a friend who had brought by a gift of wine.
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So then I thought of the song "Over the Rainbow", so then I looked up who wrote it. And found the lyrics were by a man I don't think I'd ever heard of, Yip Harburg. Look him up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yip_Harburg You might find a little inspiration there like I did. You never know where a gift might come from.
Thanks for the link, Stephen! His FBI file is probably way longer than mine! I tracked down some of his poems, mentioned in the Wikipedia article:
ATHEIST
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree;
And only God who makes the tree
Also makes the fools like me.
But only fools like me, you see,
Can make a God, who makes a tree.
REPENT IN PLEASURE
A little secret sinning now and then,
Should not disturb the saintliest of men;
For when your life is spent, and sun has set,
It’s easier to repent than to regret.
MUTUAL ADMIRATION
“Speaking of the Common Man,” said Lincoln,
“God must love him.”
And the Common Man, he must love God–
He made so many of Him.
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
God made the world in six days flat,
On the seventh, He said, “I’ll rest,”
So He let the thing into orbit swing,
To give it a dry-run test.
A billion years went by, then He
Took a look at the whirling blob;
His spirits fell, as He shrugged, “Ah well,
It was only a six-day job.”
FAIL SAFE
It’s a hundred billion dollars
Every year at your expense,
For the Pentagon to gadget up
Our national defense.
But it’s comforting to know that
In the up and coming war,
We’ll be dying far more safely
Than we ever died before.
Glen thanks for the Hanukkah wishes along with the Christmas ones. I'm visiting my daughter in Charlottesville and she is making delicious potato latkes. Happy Holidays to everyone and Happy New Year. ❤️❤️❤️
On Christmas Day, Donald Trump issued his traditional holiday greeting. Posting on Truth Social, the social-media site created to serve as a platform for both his personal enrichment and his political aggrandizement, he reprised his threats to reclaim the Panama Canal from its current state of being controlled by the country in which it exists, tweaked Canada as America’s future “51st state,” pushed his plan to purchase Greenland “for National Security purposes,” and wished a merry Christmas to the “Radical Left Lunatics” he so recently defeated in “the Greatest Election in the History of Our Country.” Would it be too 2016 of me to suggest that this is absurd, embarrassing, worrisome stuff? As 2024 ends, the prevailing attitude toward the manic stylings and overheated threats of the once and future President, even among his diehard critics, seems to be more one of purposeful indifference than of explicit resistance; call it surrender or simply resignation to the political reality that Trump, despite it all, is twenty-five days away from returning to the Oval Office.
A year ago, a Trump victory was far from inconceivable—the grimly anti-incumbent mood of the American electorate, and the former President’s almost comically easy dispatch of a host of G.O.P. primary challengers who were, for the most part, afraid to criticize him, suggested that it was not only a possible outcome but even a likely one. Yet it is also true that, as 2024 began, Trump’s win was far from inevitable—an alternate reality that, like the half of the country that could not countenance his return to office, has been erased from the Trumpian narrative about his “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” In the weeks since Election Day, it’s been as if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and all the polite technocratic debates of their polite, technocratic Administration have vanished into the mists of time—were the past four years in Washington all some strange dream sequence, like that entire season of “Dallas” back in the nineteen-eighties?
Radical revisionism—by Trump and on his behalf—is a strong contender for the theme of this disruptive year, in which some unique property of political alchemy managed to transform a defeated and disgraced ex-President facing four criminal indictments into a perfectly electable Republican candidate with a quirky communications style, a host of more or less legitimate grievances, and a plan to Make America Great Again by empowering his billionaire sidekicks and rolling back laws, regulations, geopolitical trends, and social norms that he and his voters don’t like. Rewriting history, relitigating old fights, plain old revanchism—these worked for Trump in 2024, and it’s a safe bet that, along with revenge and retribution, they will be the themes of the new Trump Administration that takes office on January 20th.
Whether it’s peremptory attacks on a 1977 Panama Canal treaty whose terms he now wants to reject or the resurrection of nineteenth-century economic protectionism or the fantastical reimagining of the January 6th rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol as innocent martyrs, Trump is a conservative in an entirely different sense than the one we have come to know: he is not a Republican who sticks to the status quo but instead a would-be strongman whose attachment to a past of his own imagining will now, once again, become the country’s governing ideology.
Every year since 2018, I have written a version of this year-end Letter from Washington. What’s striking reading back through them now, on the eve of Trump’s return to the White House, is not so much his continued dominance of our politics as it is the consistency of how he has accomplished it—the manic governing by social-media pronouncement, the bizarro news cycles, and the normalizing of what would have previously been considered the politically un-normalizable. Even his targets are remarkably similar year in and year out—the Radical Left Lunatics, windmills, Justin Trudeau. In Trump’s 2023 Christmas social-media post, he wished the nation a happy holiday while praying that his enemies “ROT IN HELL.” What we have managed to forget about Trump in these past few years would fill entire books about other Presidents. This year-end exercise has been a small effort in trying to remember.
This strikes me as more important than ever in 2024, after an election year in which tapping into the American capacity for collective forgetting proved to be one of Trump’s superpowers. Many of the year’s signal events were so dramatic that they don’t need much recounting now: Trump’s unprecedented criminal trial and his thirty-four felony convictions in a New York state court last May; the incoherent June 27th debate that effectively ended Biden’s career; the attempted assassination of Trump as he spoke at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13th, and the remarkable images of him thrusting his fist in the air and mouthing “Fight!” immediately after a bullet grazed his ear but spared his life. It was just a few days later that Biden dropped out of the race, reinvigorating Democrats with sudden hope that they might beat Trump, after all—only to have Harris, despite a surge of joyous online memes and more than a billion dollars in campaign contributions, suffer an even bigger defeat to Trump than Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss to him in 2016.
Even the subsidiary plotlines of 2024 were epic, from the spectre of the world’s richest man leaping around Trump’s rallies like an overheated schoolboy to the scorching success of a Republican ad campaign that portrayed America as a dangerous hellscape of invading illegal immigrants, rampant inflation, and intolerant leftists eager to force transgender surgery on your children. Soon after the election, Trump tried to appoint Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, even knowing that the Florida Republican had been investigated by his own congressional colleagues for paying a minor for sex—a choice that resulted in one of the fastest implosions of a Cabinet selection in modern history.
We will not soon forget all that. Where Trump benefits more from this failure to remember is in the common practice, among his allies and detractors alike, of disregarding much of what he says and does, whether it is his vow to close the U.S. border and begin the largest mass deportations in American history on the first day of his Presidency, to end the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours, or to nullify the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. So that’s what I’m most hoping does not get lost in this apathetic moment, when his enemies are averting their gaze and his allies are so confident in the imminent arrival of a maga utopia that they have little need to sweat the details. (A new Associated Press / norc poll, released Thursday, says sixty-five per cent of American adults now feel the need to limit their consumption of news about politics and the government—the Great Tune-Out is real.)
Heading into 2025, I do not believe that warnings about the dangers of an unchecked Trump are overstated. Instead, it is the creeping sense that Trump is entering office largely unopposed that more and more worries me. It is a major warning sign, among many, that the ideological policing of Trump’s adversaries as shrill, hysterical, and hypocritical has been so very effective. I am bracing for impact, and not only fearing but expecting the worst.
But while Trump may now believe himself so powerful that he can rewrite history on his own behalf, it’s also fair to anticipate that his past will serve not only as prologue but as precedent for 2025. If neither the American voters nor the Republican Party could stop Trump, his many personal weaknesses just might. Presidents, especially second-term Presidents, often stumble. Many occupants of the White House find themselves bogged down in scandal and infighting, victims of their own overreach, hubris, or just sheer incompetence. This was the story of the first Trump Administration, and there is plenty of reason to believe that it will be what happens in his second term, too. Should one root for the failure of an American President? Half of the country, Trump’s half, did this, to great effect, in 2024; in 2025, it will be everybody else’s turn. ♦︎
Jay, thank you for posting Susan Glasser's very insightful article. It was spot on. Thinking ahead, I am hoping that when the hearings occur enough Republicans will vote against Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and the Education head. (I forgot her name) to name a few. Its up to all of us to push back against the angry destructive tide that is coming...Trump wants to cut programs for the poor and give tax breaks to the rich and send away immigrants who for the most part help our country so much by just being here and working and raising their families. I think there will be a lot of push back and Biden has nominated a huge amount of Judges and the ACLU will fight for civil rights. Ok, I'm trying to find a few positives. Love to all and a very healthy Happy New Year. Joanie
Apropos of Susan Glasser's column-- thanks, Jay--HCR offered this today as a way to think about Trump's behavior:
"It is starting to seem like the best way to interpret social media posts from President-elect Donald Trump is through the lens of professional wrestling. Never a true athletic competition—although it certainly required athletic training—until the 1980s, professional wrestling depended on “kayfabe,” the shared agreement among audience and actors that they would pretend the carefully constructed script and act were real.
"But as Abraham Josephine Reisman explained in the New York Times last year, Vince and Linda McMahon pushed to move professional wrestling into entertainment to avoid health regulations and the taxes imposed on actual sporting events. That shift damaged the profession until in the mid-1990s, wrestlers and promoters began to mix the fake world of wrestling with reality, bringing real-life tensions to the ring in what might or might not have been real. “Suddenly,” Reisman wrote, “the fun of the match had everything to do with decoding it.”
"Nothing was off-limits, and the more outrageous the storylines, the better. “[F]ans would give it their full attention because they couldn’t always figure out if what they were seeing was real or not.” This “neokayfabe” “rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment.”
"Reisman concluded that producers and consumers of neokayfabe “tend to lose the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t.” In that, they echo the world identified by German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt in her 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist,” she wrote, “but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”
With all the remembrances of Jimmy Carter we’re hearing today, it’s hard to avoid the glaring contrast between the generous, gracious, highly religious, selfless man that Jimmy Carter was and the incoming felon, rapist, and liar who will soon be inhabiting the White House.
Here's a recent post from one of my favorite podcasters, Tim Miller from The Bullwark. He is a former Republican Campaign consultant and still loyal Republican. I apologize for the hideous photo of Trump.
Hey guys. I’m subbing in for JVL today—and, fair warning: I get into my feelings a little bit in this one. But it’s been that sort of month. –Tim
1. The Temptation of LOLNMR
There was a phrase in vogue during the Pleistocene Trump years that became a rallying cry for professional Republican types who at the time were still trying to work through their comfort level with the party’s new overlord. It shielded them from having to really grapple with the moral compromises of their new station. If you were a Twitter addict, you will likely recall it:
LOL Nothing Matters.
In the chapter of Why We Did It in which I sketched out the different phenotypes of Trumpian enablers, I described these Republicans this way:
Then you had the LOL Nothing Matters Republicans. This cadre gained steam over the years, especially among my former peers in the campaign set. It is a comforting ethos if you are professionally obligated to defend the indefensible day in and day out. Their arguments no longer needed to have merit or be consistent because, LOL, nothing matters. . . . The LOLNMRs had decided that if someone like Trump could win, then everything that everyone does in politics is meaningless. So they became nihilists.
Sure the LOLNMR ideology was morally bankrupt and childish, but there’s no doubt why it was appealing. If a manifestly unfit Barnum & Bailey confidence man like Trump could become president, then why are the rest of us out here minding our p’s and q’s? Fuck it. Get the bag.
The case for such a mindset is, if anything, even stronger today than it was then. If Trump can win again? After all the scandals? After attempting the second-stupidest coup of the decade? At times it feels like not giving way to nihilism is the crazy reaction.
So I can’t exactly say that it was a surprise over the past week when I began to hear a lot of familiar-sounding notes from my anti-Trump friends. Many of them were now coming to the conclusion that nothing matters. That our cold, new world is Hobbesian, with everyone out to get theirs.
That mindset was reflected in the starkest manner in the reaction to President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter. Will Saletan catalogued examples of the reactions he saw on social media in an article earlier this week:
“America elected a convicted felon in 2024 and I no longer care about ‘norms,” one commenter shrugged. “The voters have spoken and integrity is passé,” said another. A third asked: “Why should he [Biden] sacrifice a single thing more for ideals the populace no longer believe in?”
Again, I get the sentiment. An adjudicated rapist felon who stored our national secrets next to his shitter is going back to the Oval Office, there are no rules!
In the days after the Hunter pardon I was inundated with variations on this theme. If I had a quarter for everyone who sent a tweet/email/DM upbraiding me for daring to even utter the word “norms,” well, I’d have a few Norms! six-packs at the very least. The notion that the Democrats need to stop caring about niceties and traditions and laws and respect was quickly catching on.
The old world where that stuff matteredisgone, they said.
Or as one friend texted, “There is no justice. Democrats were fucking morons for ever believing ‘when they go low, we go high.’ New plan: ‘when they go low, we go high—yeah, eyes, throat, nose.’”
But as disquieting as this widespread desire for retribution was, the LOL Nothing Matters sentiment was most dispiriting when it came from a place not of bloodlust but earnest sadness.
As we were watching the LSU/Oklahoma game at a bar last Saturday, one of my buddies told me that a colleague of his had begun listening to The Bulwark Podcast since the election to try to help process the dark thoughts that she was having. She is a doctor, a nice person, the kind whose whole life has been oriented toward helping others. But her resolve had been shaken. The election was a brutal intrusion signaling that people simply didn’t value being “nice,” that the country was somehow darker than she had ever really contemplated.
This listener was the epitome of that floundering “best” person that Jon Lovett described recently: “The worst people are vindicated and believe their worldview has been validated by this and the best people are uncertain and scared and angry and confused.” And so for many of these people, the fear and anger has led to a sort of surrender. A hardening of the heart. Accepting a new reality. One where the things they once thought were virtuous are not only disrespected but even harmful to progress.
And in that world, why should anyone care about any of this.
2. Their morals, their code—it’s a bad joke
I can relate to all these sentiments. Almost more than I’d like to admit.
When it comes to the idea that Democrats should fight harder, take a few cheap shots, kick the Republicans in the balls when they aren’t looking, sign me up. I’m down for that. As for the rest, well, I have told several people lately that I am concerned this election will be my Joker origin story.
But I keep pulling myself back from the brink—I think, in part, because I’ve seen how the nihilism infected my Republican friends. That cold, hard-heartedness is an ugly thing. I’ve seen the result of the LOL Nothing Matters ethos at scale, up close, and the result is horrifying.
This mindset doesn’t just corrupt people. It destroys their souls.
Turning into that is a fate best avoided, for all of us. We all of us have to summon the strength to resist the call of the nihilists.
Can I be corny for a second? I mean really corny. Dad corny. Like roll-your-eyes-so-far-back-in-your-head-that-they-get-stuck-there corny.
Because here it comes.
There is one thing that does matter in this life. And it’s the only thing you actually control: Acting in accordance with your own integrity. In a way that lets you feel good about yourself.
That’s it. Everything else out there? It’s chance. Luck. Atoms colliding.
All you can do is make choices that align with the person you want to be in the world. And periodically do a little self-examination to ensure you are doing right by yourself.
Sometimes it’s really hard. Painful, even. And you won’t always get it right. We all fail. We have blind spots. Temptations. Pride. We convince ourselves that something we want is actually something that is right for us.
That’s okay. As long as you are still keeping tabs and trying to become the best version of yourself.
So, in short, what matters is you.1 Your choices. Your integrity.
The rest of this politics stuff, yeah, it matters too. Of course it does: Lives will be upended. Good people will suffer. Undeserving people will reap unimaginable rewards.
But that’s all out of our hands now.
You can’t make Donald Trump not president. Can’t make your neighbors nicer. You can’t make them care more about the rape cabinet the president is assembling. You can’t make them value democracy or Haitian refugees or climate or reproductive rights or whatever else it may be that’s keeping you up at night over their own interests.
That’s all in the books already
All that’s left is living your values, so that hopefully, one day, you will feel good about playing a small role in whatever movement emerges to stop the current menace. Or, if that’s not in the cards (and why would it be?), at least you will know that you retained your honor as our nation succumbed to kakistocracy.
Not great. But better than the alternative.
Because that other path? The one that sounds so good in our lizard brain. Where we stop giving a fuck about corny shit like “acting in accordance with our integrity” and decide its time to laugh as the world burns? The path where we all decide that Donald Trump was right about rules and norms and values being for suckers? That’s a dark and scary path indeed.
And if somehow we eventually manage to extricate ourselves from this current predicament, I’m not interested in a sequel with a mango monster of our own making.
So I want to leave you with this.
I’m trying real hard to live a life that is fulfilling and meaningful, where I grow and if I falter I get up again. One where I examine my own actions and choices and take them seriously. Where they matter, if not to anyone else, at least to me.
I refuse to let Donald Trump take that away from me.
And you shouldn’t let him take your integrity from you either.
Because if you do, his final victory won’t be 11/5/24 or when he’s elected again as Lara’s VP in 2028. His final victory will be over you.
It might be cold comfort at this moment. It sure is for me. But that doesn’t make it any less true. At this point Donald Trump has conquered the world. But your soul is the one thing that he can’t have . . . unless you give it to him.
Thanks for the Tim Miller piece, Joan. Certainly mirrors many of my thoughts these days.
"You can’t make Donald Trump not president. Can’t make your neighbors nicer. You can’t make them care more about the rape cabinet the president is assembling. You can’t make them value democracy or Haitian refugees or climate or reproductive rights or whatever else it may be that’s keeping you up at night over their own interests.
"That’s all in the books already
"All that’s left is living your values, so that hopefully, one day, you will feel good about playing a small role in whatever movement emerges to stop the current menace. Or, if that’s not in the cards (and why would it be?), at least you will know that you retained your honor as our nation succumbed to kakistocracy.
"Not great. But better than the alternative."
This made me think of a quote from Antonio Gramsci, the early 20th Century Italian Marxist philosopher.
Our rational minds can recognize and analyze the often depressing realities that confront us. They allow us to try to understand how the world came to be as it is, and how difficult it will be to change it.
The intellect provides the only hope in figuring out how to accomplish change. But to do that, the desire for change must be driven by an optimism that's often hard to intellectually justify! How could anyone challenge the global slavery-based cotton industry? How could anyone confront the entrenched racism and violence of the post-reconstruction American south? How could anyone hope to successfully question a government and military committed to a brutal war far away from those who payed for it?
Every time entrenched realities must be confronted to make the world better, the intellect has to admit pessimism. But that reality must still be confronted, and the will must summon the optimism to bring that about. We can't make Donald Trump not President. All we can do is live our values, retain our honor, in the hope that our values and actions will make the itty-bitty changes that move reality where it needs to go.
It's all Joan's goddam fault--she sent me off on this rant! Well, Joan and Gramsci!
Joan, thank you for the Tim Miller Post. I like him a lot as well as some other former Republicans that care about the Country, the rule of Law and the Constitution more then Donald trump. Its interesting now that President Musk and Vice President Trump are not agreeing about giving visas to highly qualified technical folks who are immigrans. The Magas don't want any immigrants allowed in. That woiuld lower their long term aims of a purely White society...Anyway, I hope there are enough Republicans to say no to Hegseth. Gabbard, RFK and Patel, to name just a few. Love, Joanie
Happy New Year, good people! It's been a lovely Christmas season of carols, candy canes, lights and such, as well as soaking up family, friends, faith, food (too much!), and it took awhile for me to catch up on the many joyful posts from my fave forum "Jaybirds" that I have missed for awhile. With the new year, perhaps it's time for a sampling of some of my own thoughts, just to balance the scales a bit. Enjoyed reading Susan Glasser's offering. Particularly hooted with her "I am bracing for impact and not only fearing but expecting the worst". So many of us humanoids seem to dread change and yes, find ourselves bracing from time to time..bracing for a health test result, for a bill in the mail, for bad weather, for losses that life throws our way. In looking back over the Biden years, there have been many instances when entire families have been bracing as well: bracing for the onslaught of rising prices (which btw, rose 20% since President Biden took office), the onslaught of inflation, the onslaught of illegal border crossings, the onslaught of foreign tensions with China, Russia and the ugliness of the ill-planned Afghanistan pull-out, the onslaught of WH lies covering-up our leader's inabilities to lead, an onslaught of the transnational Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua which now continues its crime sprees over 20 states and 30 cities exposing our impotent DHS, the onslaught of antisemitism which now numbers over 2000 instances (up from 300 last year) on our college campuses, the onslaught of Democratic lawfare failures targetting Donald Trump, the onslaught of "Bidenomics" as reflected in a recent polling of registered voters when asked the question 'whether thay have been helped by President Biden's economic policies': Helped 17%, Hurt 47%, No difference 35%, onslaught of donor money of $1.5B sunk into Kamala Harris' failed campaign. These are just a tiny smattering of samples when Americans have had to brace themselves. Welcome to our world, Susan Glasser.
Too cute, Jack! My twelve year old grandson probably knows that comic book well.
Check out the consumer price index graphs online &/or, for a simple explanation clarifying the difference "tween relative (and general) price levels and inflation, read an article " How Inflation and Relative Price Increases Differ" by G. Vandenbrouke.
Inflation occurs when wages cannot compete with price levels.
Hi Nori, This is one link about the many lies Trump tells so when people believe these lies, they are like Kelly Ann Conway said, "alternate facts" which are not realy facts. Love, Joanie
Nori,just in case you still think Trump and the MAGAs are telling the truth, today Trump appeared to blame Biden's alleged open border policy for the New Orleans massacre. Turns out the perpetrator was an American citizen. Love, Joanie
(Editor's Note: In response to Nori's most gracious Christmas and New Year's message, I thought it would be worthwhile to bring to light Donald Trump's 'Go to Hell' Christmas message as well as the Christmas messages of recent U.S. Presidents. Happy New Year everyone -- Republicans as well as Democrats.)
Merry Christmas to the “wonderful soldiers of China” and to “Governor Justin Trudeau of Canada” and “the people of Greenland.” As for the 37 men on federal death row who recently received commutations from President Biden? “GO TO HELL!”
The messages, posted online by President-elect Donald J. Trump on Christmas, were characteristic for a man known for his bombastic social media presence, but they veered sharply from the standard holiday ideals of unity delivered from the White House.
The posts, which appeared on Truth Social, the online platform owned by Mr. Trump’s media company, labeled his opponents as “Radical Left Lunatics,” and once again described the current president as “Sleepy Joe Biden.”
Mr. Trump’s Christmas comments also hinted at what could be his priorities come Jan. 20, as he spoke about asserting U.S. control over the Panama Canal and Greenland, which he covets for its reserves of rare earth minerals needed for advanced technology.
“We had the Greatest Election in the History of our Country, a bright light is now shining over the U.S.A.,” Mr. Trump wrote, “and, in 26 days, we will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. MERRY CHRISTMAS!”
Here’s a look at how some past presidents have addressed the nation on Christmas, in times of war, recession and instability.
Franklin D. Roosevelt: “We set our faith in human love.”
On Dec. 24, 1941, just over two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt acknowledged that many Americans might be asking how they could celebrate Christmas “in a world at war, a world of fighting and suffering and death?”
Standing alongside Winston Churchill, he said the answer was clear. “Our strongest weapon in this war is that conviction of the dignity and brotherhood of man which Christmas Day signifies — more than any other day or any other symbol,” the president said, according to The American Presidency Project at the University of California-Santa Barbara.
“Against enemies who preach the principles of hate and practice them,” he said, “we set our faith in human love and in God’s care for us and all men everywhere.”
Calvin Coolidge: “The great sacrifice in defense of our ideals.”
On Dec. 24, 1923, President Calvin Coolidge lit the first national Christmas tree on the Ellipse, south of the White House, pressing a button that illuminated 2,500 electric lightbulbs, according to the White House Historical Association. He also sent a reassuring message to disabled American veterans of World War I, which had ended five years earlier.
“The heart of America is with those who made the great sacrifice in defense of our ideals,” he said. “Whether you continue in the hospitals fighting for recovery or are battling to reestablish yourself in civil pursuits, the nation will be mindful of its obligations to those so honorably stricken.”
Richard M. Nixon: “The spirit of Christmas is not measured by the number of lights on a tree.”
On Dec. 14, 1973, President Richard M. Nixon noted that, instead of many lights, there would be only a single illuminated star on the national Christmas tree, as the United States faced an energy crisis.
“And in a way, I suppose one could say with only one light on the tree, this will be a very dreary Christmas, but we know that isn’t true, because the spirit of Christmas is not measured by the number of lights on a tree,” he said. “The spirit of Christmas is measured by the love that each of us has in his heart for his family, for his friends, for his fellow Americans, and for people all over the world.”
Nixon also noted that it was the first time in eight years “when no American prisoner of war is away from home at Christmas.”
Ronald Reagan: “The light of freedom is not going to be extinguished.”
President Ronald Reagan’s first Christmas address in office came in 1981 as the American economy had entered a recession and tensions overseas were running high.
“Over the past year, we’ve begun the long, hard work of economic recovery,” he said. “Our goal is an America in which every citizen who needs and wants a job can get a job.”
Poland had recently declared martial law, and Mr. Reagan used his Christmas message to not only ask for faith in the United States, but to also warn about the threat posed by the Soviet Union.
“The Soviet Union, through its threats and pressures, deserves a major share of blame for the developments in Poland,” he said.
“Once, earlier in this century, an evil influence threatened that the lights were going out all over the world,” he added. “Let the light of millions of candles in American homes give notice that the light of freedom is not going to be extinguished.”
Barack Obama: “The spirit that binds us together.”
In their 2015 video, the president spoke of what he saw as values synonymous with the Christmas spirit. “Treating one another with love and compassion,” he said. “Caring for those on society’s margins.” He urged Americans to view their lives through that lens.
“That’s the spirit that binds us together,” Mr. Obama said. “Not just as Christians, but as Americans of all faiths. It’s what the holidays are about: coming together as one American family to celebrate our blessings and the values we hold dear.”
Joe Biden: “Really look at each other, not as Democrats or Republicans.”
Several hours before Mr. Trump posted his Christmas message this year, President Biden offered his own valedictory holiday greeting.
“For the last time as your president, it’s my honor to wish all of America a very Merry Christmas,” he posted on X. “My hope for our nation, today and always, is that we continue to seek the light of liberty and love, kindness and compassion, dignity and decency.”
Mr. Biden’s previous holiday messages have also urged hope and asked for American resolve. In 2022, when the country was reeling from the deaths and economic losses caused by the coronavirus pandemic, his Christmas address asked Americans to find a “stillness” at the heart of the holiday.
“The pandemic has taken so much from us,” Mr. Biden said. “We’ve lost so much time with one another. We’ve lost so many people — people we loved.”
“Really look at each other,” he continued, “not as Democrats or Republicans, not as members of ‘Team Red’ or ‘Team Blue,’ but as who we really are: fellow Americans.”
