By Stephen Macaulay

Although Christmas has been a federal holiday in the U.S. since 1870, it is encouraging to know that Donald Trump is to be thanked for his making the federal —and for many, a religious — holiday a continuing phenomenon. Wednesday on the Hugh Hewitt radio show, when asked about the subject, Trump answered, “You know, when I was running, 2016, Christmas was like you couldn’t say the word. I said the word. And I said we’re going to bring back Christmas, and we’re going to be saying Christmas. And you know, department stores weren’t using it in ads, little things like they’d show snow, and they’d show a red wall, but they wouldn’t say ‘Merry Christmas.’ And I think we brought it all the way back. And we can do it with other things. I look at what’s happening, and you know, this whole female athlete thing is a very big deal, too. I see that a record, a swimming record was broken by 18 seconds, another one was broken by 38 seconds, okay? You know what 38 seconds is, right?”

Let’s face it, it is good to see Trump’s short attention span is as robust as ever. “This whole female athlete thing” is a natural segue from Santa Claus. (Presumably Trump was talking about some transgender athletes, but that is never made clear.)

The continuing exchange shows the razor-sharpness of Trump and his interlocutor:

DJT: And we have to bring back the female athlete. This is just crazy what’s going on. These records, you know, one record held up for many, many years, and if they break it by one-eighth of a second, that’s a lot. You don’t break it by like 36 seconds and 18 seconds. It’s ridiculous what’s going on.

HH: Only Bob Beaman in the long jump, if you remember that.

DJT: That’s right.

HH: Bob Beaman shattered. That was a big one.

DJT: Yeah, he’s about it.

HH: Yeah.

DJT: But even that wasn’t relatively like this.

HH: No, it wasn’t.

DJT: This is crazy. I look forward to seeing what happens with respect to the weightlifting records. That’ll be interesting.”

Bob Beamon in the long jump? Beamon was not (and is not) a female athlete. He set a long jump record at the 1968 Summer Olympics, a distance record that stood for 23 years when Mike Powell jumped 8.95 meters, five centimeters more than Beamon. Powell is male. We are not certain whether either of them can swim, but odds are they can.

The two then moved on to Trump’s forthcoming book, Our Journey Together, which the always articulate Trump described as “a book of pictures, largely, with statements, but a book of pictures.”

Why did he do it? (Although let’s face it: he undoubtedly didn’t take the pictures, and one would be dubious about his penning of the statements.)

He responded (take a deep breath), “And I did it at the request of some, because we had a great presidency. Even though we were surrounded by maniacs that were looking to do damage, but we had a great presidency in terms of what we, we rebuilt the military. We cut taxes more than, you know, the biggest tax cut in history, as you know, biggest regulation cuts in history. What we’ve done was just amazing. And it was, you know, in many ways, it was a great time. It was a nasty time, because the Democrats are absolutely crazed – two impeachment hoaxes, you look at the Mueller witch hunt, we went through so much, and yet we got more done that virtually anybody. I mean, you just take a look at what we did. And we had a tremendous foreign policy. You didn’t have planes flying over Taiwan, and he understood that. You didn’t have planes, bombers flying over Taiwan. You didn’t have what’s happening on Ukraine. You didn’t have this. I mean, this looks like it’s very serious stuff. They don’t respect us anymore. And then when you add in the worst, in my opinion, the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, which is the withdrawal from, the way they did the withdrawal from, I mean, Afghanistan, I’ve never, I’ve never seen anything, in all the years I’ve been doing this stuff, and I’ve been watching it just like you have, and I’ve been involved with it as you are, I’ve never seen anything worse than the, or more embarrassing, than what we did with Afghanistan. We lost soldiers, by the way, many, many very severely wounded that nobody even talks about, we left hostages. We left American citizens behind. We left $85 billion dollars’ worth of brand-new beautiful equipment, much of it behind. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. And I had that so perfect. Every screw, every nail, every bolt was going to be taken out. Every tank, we would have taken everything. We were even taking down the hangars. And we were keeping Bagram not because of Afghanistan. You know, it was billions of dollars to build it. We were keeping it because it’s one hour from the Chinese nuclear plant.”

Yes, a picture book. With such rhetorical prowess, it is a disappointment that there wouldn’t be more insights from our former dear leader.

Hewitt said to Trump: “I think you’re going to run again. I think you’re going to win.”

And this is after Trump made it clear how he views leadership: “I get along with him [Putin], and I got along with Xi great. I got along with all of them. I get along with Kim Jong-un. The ones I didn’t get along with were the weak ones. The weak ones, I didn’t get along with.”

MAGA?