You thought Trump couldn’t get any worse? He asks boy, 7, if he still believes in Santa!
IT was supposed to be a touching phone call where the US president reassured a child that Santa was on his way with Christmas gifts.
But Donald Trump ruined the magical moment for a seven-yearold boy by crassly asking if he still believed in Father Christmas.
Mr Trump told the boy that at his age it was ‘marginal’ if he thought Santa was real – earning the president scorn on social media. Mr Trump seemed to enjoy the exchange on Christmas Eve and grinned broadly as he poked holes in the boy’s dreams.
The episode seemed to sum up the president’s miserable Christmas in the White House amid a government shutdown and the worst December 24 performance on Wall Street in history. Earlier in the day, Mr Trump tweeted that he was ‘all alone (poor me) in the White House’ – which earned him comparisons to Shakespeare’s tragic character King Lear.
The conversation with the boy happened during a phone call set up by a service for children to see where Santa is on the planet. Some of them are patched through to the president and the first lady.
In the call Mr Trump told the boy, Coleman from Indiana: ‘Are you still a believer in Santa? ’Cos at seven it’s marginal, right?’
The comments drew ridicule on Twitter, as Mr Trump was dubbed ‘President Scrooge’, with another user saying: ‘Children should be protected from him’. First lady Melania Trump took a softer approach in her phone calls and told one child that Santa ‘is still far away but he will be in your house tomorrow’.
The president’s comments to the boy are the latest in a series of insensitive and blunt remarks.
He has previously said of immigrants: ‘Why are we having all these people from sh**hole countries coming here?’ He also told a breastfeeding mother: ‘You’re disgusting.’
Mr Trump said of North Korea’s leader: ‘Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me old when I would never call him short and fat?’ He also boasted of how clever he is, insisting: ‘I’m intelligent. Some people would say I’m very, very, very intelligent.’
Mr Trump’s woes piled up over Christmas after the US government shut down because the president wants $5billion (€4.4billion) for his border wall with Mexico. There is no end to the deadlock in sight.
His ‘poor me’ tweet fell especially flat among the 800,000 federal workers who are either being told to stay at home or made to work with no pay due to the shutdown.