Belief System

Okay, here's where we stand currently: On Christmas Eve, the "President," helping out in ways only he can, took a call from the NORAD switchboard. Happily, he was only responding to the North American Air Defense's Santa Tracker and not anything more sensitive like nuclear warheads or missile launch codes. No, he took this opportunity to ask a seven year old girl if she was "still a believer" in Mister Claus and then suggested that might be a little "marginal" for someone of her advanced years.
Okay, so maybe my son was on the far end of the spectrum by maintaining his belief in Saint Nick into middle school. He was not availed of the same clever deductive reasoning my older brother shared with me as he pointed out that Santa and our mother had very similar handwriting. That was perhaps an awakening I may not have arrived at on my own, but it was enough to tip the scales on that rite of passage. However, since we both enjoyed several more years of keeping our youngest brother in the dark, the magic lived on.
Who knows what will happen in this little girl's mind. She has become yet another in a series of flashpoints in a year full of "can you believe what he just did?" The little girl's parents, for their part, were fine with the interaction between the "President" and their daughter. “I’m a teacher. I’m OK with the vocabulary,” mom said. “He was very kind. I was very impressed with the phone call.” And there, it might have ended. The social media folks had their fun, and a seven year old has a story to tell when she  gets back to school. 
Then Mike Huckabee got into the act. “It wasn’t like he was boiling the little girl’s bunny rabbit in a pot on the stove or something. He asked a simple question.” To be clear, no bunnies were harmed in the creation of this post, but it certainly makes me wonder what goes on in Mister Mike's head. He went on: “You can never find a way that President Trump will make some of the people in the press happy,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what he does. If he didn’t make the call, if he didn’t talk to the little girl, they’d say that he was curled up in a fetal position in the White House and that he was unwilling to come out and talk to anybody.”
And so, with the boiled bunny and the fetal position, we now have two additional images that will not soon be sandblasted off the nation's collective hippocampus. Happy Holidays!