Virginia, Santa: it’s the sequel
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“Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at 7, it’s marginal, right?”
— President Donald J. Trump, in a Christmas Eve phone call to 7-year-old Collman Lloyd of Ohio Dear President Trump: I am 8 years old. some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If President Trump says it, it’s so.” Then he laughs very hard and has another cocktail. Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia, your little friends must be Fake News because they are wrong. WRONG!
It’s a skeptical age filled with Witch Hunts in which America’s greatest president, a man who has SACRIFICED SO MUCH for this great Nation can be attacked so, so unfairly by a lying media pack that invents Phony Sources to spin LIES! So no wonder your friends think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little, tiny, really very small minds. Sad!
All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. I mean, not my mind — which I’m here to tell you is a very, very good mind, one of the very best, high-quality minds around: top marks at Wharton School of Business, which is one of the finest schools in the country, maybe in the world, or so I’ve heard.
A guy once told me that in this great universe of ours, “man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.” But this person might never have met me, so what does he know? Did this guy ever meet my good friend Roy Cohn, a remarkable lawyer and a total “Pit Bull” in a courtroom. I mean, the guy was savage — a Killer. His intellect was pretty good, let me tell you.
Where was I? We have a lot of things going on here right now, Virginia. It’s easy to get a little Distracted. Oh, yes — Santa!
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus — believe me. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion and Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. I mean my life, but you get the idea.
It would be Very Bad to be in the world if there were no Santa Claus, right? It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias, and while I don’t know you, I’m sure that would be rough for your parents.
There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence, as a guy once wrote.
I’m a firm believer in childlike faith, Virginia. And not just for children, either. You might not
know this, but the Fake News Bezos-funded Washington Post last month put it out that I’ve made 6,420 “false or misleading claims” in the first 649 days since I took office, and that the frequency of those false statements is spiking as my presidency goes on and becomes so much More Interesting.
Now, despite all that Wharton education I’m not a mathematician, but if you average that out I’m pretty sure that’s roughly 10 false or misleading statements a day. And Virginia, I’m going to be “frank” with you, because I like you and you’re a fellow New Yorker: I might have spread around a few misleading statements before I got to the White House. In fact, I bragged about it in my first book. It’s sort of My Thing. How doi getaway with it? Because in the same way that you believe in Santa, there are a lot of grownups who enjoy fun little Stories that give them a warm sense that they understand the World. The lying media can nitpick all they want, but consider this: Studies have shows that about a quarter of your fellow little 8-year-olds believe in Santa — and that’s a number that’s stayed Very Consistent through the years.
According to a recent poll from totally fake and very bad NBC News and the equally awful except for the editorial page Wall Street Journal, about a quarter of Americans have a “very positive” impression of me, their President. (The poll said 44 percent had a “very negative” impression — the losers!)
So when you think about it, I’m doing about as well as Santa, one of the greatest brands in the world and elsewhere.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in the ISIS hordes pouring across our totally awful Southern Border, or that Mexico won’t pay for the Beautiful Wall or slatted fence or something that is coming, no matter what. You might has well believe that Rudy Giuliani isn’t a good lawyer.
Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. Which means that those other things must be true too, right? The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
No Santa Claus? FAKE NEWS!
Like my former spokesman John Miller, he might be fictional but he lives and lives forever.
The rest of us are more temporary. Marginal, you might say.