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MAGAs Can’t Help But Be Total A-Holes About Jill Biden’s Final White House Christmas Decorations

This is absolutely ridiculous.

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It seems as though it’s become a new holiday tradition to personalize attacks against whoever’s decorating the White House for Christmas each year. There was a time when, regardless of party affiliation, Americans just appreciated the splendor of Christmas as celebrated in the nation’s capital. Those days are apparently gone.

Even though this story is about Republicans attacking Jill Biden’s Christmas choices, let me just get this out of the way: Yes, liberals made fun of Melania’s decorations back in 2017. We know. And I’m not going to say “But Melania’s were bad,” because style is a matter of opinion.

But what Melania did with the White House was bizarre and such a departure from anything we’d seen before that it had literally nothing to do with America or American tradition. The closest it got to anything like that was when social media users compared it to American Horror Story, that creepy show on FX that mostly looks like a nightmare.

And there’s another difference as well: Sure, Melania was criticized. By random Americans on social media. People with no political stake in seeing her fail. The people who are criticizing Jill Biden aren’t just regular people, they’re Republican officials. Like, people who have better things to do than poke fun at how the First Lady decorates and should probably be doing those things.

On Monday, the White House unveiled the decorations that were set to match the theme of “A Season of Peace and Light.” In their holiday message for the country, the Bidens wrote “At the holidays, Americans come together every year in fellowship and faith, reminding us that we are stronger as a community than we are apart.”

Included in the spectacle are nearly 30,000 brightly-colored ornaments, and in one of the many decorated historical rooms, there was even a circus or carnival-type carousel of giant-sized ornaments.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri sent a message through his communications director, Abigail Jackson, which she posted on X:

In fact, Hawley’s office couldn’t STOP making fun of Jill’s choices:

But Josh and Abigail weren’t alone. Trump’s “Rapid Response” team got in on the action, too, as though this was political in some way. The Director of Team Trump, Jake Schneider, posted a tweet as well, making sure to insult Doctor Jill Biden personally at the same time:

And insults are clearly part of the Rapid Response team’s job description, because the Deputy Director, Greg Price, was quick to get his two cents in on social media as well:

Even though he’s not an elected official, Benny Johnson is certainly no random commenter on the internet — he’s a prominent and prolific conservative commentator that Republicans turn to all the time. Benny had his fun, too.

In all of the comments on these posts, there are of course the Average Joe commenters agreeing with them or adding their own jabs. Some of them are even wistful for the days of Melania being in charge of decorating for Christmas.

Ironically, however, I don’t think Melania is looking forward to getting back to decorating. She doesn’t seem to have liked it that much the first time she was in the White House. After she was panned for her 2017 decorations, she was caught on tape in the middle of the following year complaining about having to do it at all. In the recording that was obtained by CNN, Melania can be heard expressing her feelings to her then-senior advisor Stephanie Winston-Wolkoff:

I’m working … my a*s 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?”

Andrew Simpson
meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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