If I remember correctly, it was Christmas Eve 1992 when I learned there was no Santa Claus.
I was a 10-year-old elementary school student in Austin, Texas, and even though I had already debunked the existence of the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, I didn’t seem ready to give up my youth and clung to Santa for as long as I could.
I cried when I found my parents trying to deliver a gift that supposedly came from the North Pole.
More than 30 years later, many Americans feel similarly duped this holiday season by another man in red: MAGA Red, to be exact.
As President Donald Trump nears the end of his first year in office, he has not fulfilled nearly all of his major promises, save for the frenzied deportations that have helped turn the country into a hallowed and merry police state.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found President Trump’s approval rating at just 39%, even as Americans grapple with the staggering cost of living, including soaring prices for fruits, vegetables and meat, as well as soaring rent and electricity bills.
This year’s federal government shutdown left millions of people facing the distinct possibility of starvation, an arrangement that is rather at odds with the whole “Make America Great Again” plan.
Job losses due to the government shutdown have caused the unemployment rate to rise, reaching 4.6%, the highest level in nearly five years. According to Reuters, “Many economists believe that employers held back on hiring due to what some described as the shock of President Trump’s import tariffs.”
Therefore, from a practical perspective, Mr. Trump has decisively betrayed his promise to rebuild the US economy. But in the president’s own world of hyperbolic make-believe, he gave the current economy an “A++++” rating, while declaring that the country’s supposed “price” crisis was a Democratic “hoax” meant to tarnish the president’s image.
Admittedly, the United States has never been known for its affordability. Ultimately, it would upend the crux of brutal capitalism and the hierarchical structure of human life that underpins plutocracy.
And while Republicans and Democrats may claim to be ideologically opposed, they are two sides of the same coin in perpetuating the tyranny of racialized elites and ensuring that poverty remains the leading cause of death in one of the wealthiest countries on earth.
I am currently on vacation visiting my mother in Louisville, Kentucky. A trip to the supermarket the other day saved me $237.27. That’s roughly the monthly rent for a house on the beaches of southern Mexico. Our shopping cart wasn’t full, but there was one meat product and no alcoholic beverages.
Louisville, by the way, was the site of the infamous March 2020 police killing of 26-year-old emergency room technician Breonna Taylor, an unarmed black woman. Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice sought just one day in prison for a former police officer convicted in the Taylor shooting, which occurred on the watch of the first Trump administration.
The officer was ultimately sentenced to a slightly longer prison term of 33 months.
In fact, if your holiday wish list happens to include ending systemic racism and police brutality, you’ll be left with nothing but disappointment.
As for other modern-day Justice Department misdeeds, at least 16 files related to the case of late financier and child molester Jeffrey Epstein mysteriously disappeared from the department’s website on Saturday, shortly after being released.
One of the items missing was a photo of President Trump, who had previously denounced the national uproar over the government’s efforts to block the release of documents related to Epstein as a “Democrat hoax.”
Other recently released documents are heavily redacted or blacked out, serving as “another slap in the face” to Epstein’s victims, as survivor Marina Lacerda puts it.
In other words, the recent national panorama isn’t evoking much holiday cheer.
But then I end up spreading “false rumors” again.
Meanwhile, this festive season also coincided with President Trump’s continued reckless bombing of boats in Venezuelan waters and the accompanying extrajudicial killings of sailors, presumably in the name of fighting Venezuela’s “narco-terrorism.”
The United States is now expanding its anti-Venezuela repertoire to include the hijacking of oil tankers. Meanwhile, President Trump expanded on his list of fabricated feuds, making patently absurd claims on social media, in his usual capital letters, that the South American country had previously stolen “oil, land, and other assets” from the United States. On Thursday, the president did not rule out war with Venezuela in an interview with NBC.
On the other side of the world, Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is rapidly progressing under the guise of a ceasefire brokered by Trump. Like his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, Trump has funneled billions of American taxpayer dollars to genocidal nations.
Call it a giant stocking stuffer.
And this Christmas season is by no means a merry one.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
