Melania Trump still wants to peace on Christmas

“People are proud to be saying Merry Christmas again. I am proud to have led the charge against the assault [on] our cherished and beautiful phrase.” This was Donald Trump in 2017, claiming victory in a war on Christmas that existed only in the minds of Fox News viewers. But the following year, when photos of 2018’s White House Christmas decorations emerged, they suggested there might be a counterstrike from within.

Starting with Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy, Christmas is part of the first lady’s job. She is the public face of all the pageantry that attends it: She plans the White House holiday decor and chooses each year’s theme; she greets the official Christmas tree, which arrives by horse-drawn carriage; she stands beside the president at the Ellipse as he lights the National Christmas Tree; and, after the decor is crafted and installed, she attends the yearly unveiling.

The theme for 2018’s holiday was “American Treasures,” but most people remember it as the year of the Murder Trees — parallel lines of bright-red, berry-covered cones, bereft of lights and ornaments, that filled the East Colonnade. Even if you overlooked the strong “Handmaid’s Tale” energy of the setup, it was hard to call it festive. Two years later, we learned that 2018 was also the year the first lady complained to friend and aide Stephanie Winston Wolkoff that she was “working my ass off on the Christmas stuff, that, you know, who gives a f*ck about the Christmas stuff and decorations? But I need to do it, right?” Melania didn’t attend that year’s unveiling, so it wasn’t until Wolkoff released recordings of their conversation that the dystopian trees started making a little more sense: Were these the first openly hostile Christmas decorations in White House history?

The official press release announcing 2025’s Christmas theme — “Home is Where the Heart Is” — asserts that “The first lady’s creative inspiration is drawn from the joys, challenges, and frequent motion derived from motherhood and business. ‘The constant movement has taught me that home is not merely a physical space; rather, it is the warmth and comfort I carry within, regardless of my surroundings,’ America’s first lady reflects. ‘This Christmas, let’s celebrate the love we hold within ourselves and share it with the world around us. After all, wherever we are, we can create a home filled with grace, radiance, and endless possibilities.’”

This certainly sounds like the third Mrs. Trump has opened her heart to the season, but, as they say, the proof is in the pudding. And it wasn’t surprising that when it came time for the annual tradition of reading a picture book to children at Washington, D.C.’s Children’s National Hospital, the least-enthusiastic first lady in living memory did not bring her A game.

Technically, Melania was supposed to be reading a picture book to children at the hospital. It’s something she’s done before — reading from “The Polar Express” in 2017, for instance. But the vibes were darker this year, quite literally: Melania showed up to the event dressed less for Yuletide than for the funeral of a second-tier Batman villain. She settled into a chair in front of an enormous Christmas tree with the book “How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney?” and proceeded to read it slowly and mechanically, stumbling over words and through awkward pauses. She occasionally looked up to smile, but by all other appearances was reading to herself. Most crucially, she did not once turn the book around and take a brief pause so the children could see the pictures on each page she read.

This is the barest minimum required when reading a picture book to children. No one was asking the first lady to do funny voices or make clippety-cloppity reindeer-hoof noises or pantomime Santa getting stuck in the chimney. “How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney?” isn’t a timeless classic that kids are likely to know by heart as they do “The Night Before Christmas.” “How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney?” is a story that imagines Santa Claus as a shapeshifter who takes different forms in order to deliver presents on his Christmas Eve route. When such a book suggests that Santa takes the form of, say, a mouse, or taffy or a letter pushed through the mail slot, the key next step is to show the picture to the children.

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It’s impossible to know whether the first lady’s omission was intentional. But beyond confusing and shortchanging the kids (the facial expressions of the little girl sitting to Melania’s right say it all), half-assing the reading was also pretty disrespectful to the book’s creators. Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen probably already know that the First Family respects books about as much as they respect pronouns, but one clue from the past makes me think Melania knowingly did the man behind “I Want My Hat Back” dirty.

The first lady definitely knows how to read a children’s book for an audience — we’ve seen her do it on other holidays, like Easter. But looking at a video of her 2017 “Polar Express” reading, during which she also did not show the book’s illustrations to the kids, is a strong argument that hating Christmas is simply Melania Trump’s thing, much the same as Nancy Reagan’s thing was astrology and popping into 1980s sitcoms to remind kids not to do drugs.

Some elements of this year’s White House decor theme seem similarly freighted. The White House’s green room, according to its Holiday 2025 tourbook, is where “the simple pleasure of games, crafts and family fun fills every corner.” This is where visitors will see LEGO portraits of George Washington and Donald Trump. It’s also where they’ll see houses built from cards and dominoes — you know, things that are frequently used as metaphors for one small move that leads to a spectacular collapse.

If this were a different administration, it might not mean anything: It’s a game room and those are games. But this White House currently stands for acts of corruption so brazen and incompatible with the norms of government (and law, and humanity) that they could not be understood as real until they actually happened. “Come on, he would never do that” became “Well, he did that” again and again, and now something like, say, a house of cards with notably Kremlin-ish spires in the White House seems solidly on-brand.

And Melania Trump’s performative gestures in the general direction of children exist to obfuscate the many ways that American children’s lives have been made demonstrably worse by her husband’s presidencies. This year’s addition of a butterfly-bedecked “Fostering the Future Red Room” to the White House Christmas festivities — it’s described by the press release as “a transformational experience dedicated to the foster-care community” — nods to a recently announced initiative of the same name. The glass ornaments scrawled with a slapdash “Be Best” that hang alongside the butterflies on the room’s Christmas tree, though, are reminders that the first lady’s supposedly child-centered program has, to date, operationalized almost nothing.

From immigration to food security to environmental-safety rollbacks, the two Trump administrations have embraced and adoption of policies and actions that are particularly harmful to children. There’s the effort to eliminate the Department of Education and the withdrawal of funding for things like pediatric cancer research and investigating abuse and sex crimes against children. By the end of 2020, attacks on the ACA had left hundreds of thousands and children without health insurance. There’s the abrupt shuttering of Head Start programs and the continued forcible separation of children from their families. And, of course, there’s whatever is in the Epstein Files.

Against this backdrop, Melania Trump’s unwillingness to successfully conduct a Christmas storytime comes across like insult to injury — perhaps not quite on the same level as the jacket she famously wore when visiting a children’s detention center at the border, emblazoned with “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” but at the same intersection of stingy and cruel. But is it possible that the first lady’s shambolic read-along was sparked by a more timely anger? As the president oversaw a hasty demolition of the White House’s East Wing — historically the domain of first ladies — his remark that Melania had “loved her little office” jumped out.

Perhaps Melania is just matching her husband’s destructive pettiness, in which case she’s joined an allegedly growing number of women of means who opt for quiet quitting their unhappy marriages rather than divorcing. She’s still the first lady, but maybe she’s decided to put even less effort into the appearances, the overseas trips and smile for the photo ops demanded of her. Having never signed up for this sad charade, malicious compliance is one of the few weapons she has. (What’s Trump going to do about it, bury her on his golf course?)

In the meantime, though, this might be the one acceptable moment for Melania to borrow from her predecessor. The former first lady, after all, had no trouble reading, making sure everyone saw the pictures in the book and riffing with her audience at Children’s Hospital — all with a 60-pound dog in her lap. The current one could do wonders by just pretending that she does, in fact, care.