A stocking full of coal may not be so bad — that's what US President Donald Trump suggested to a young girl who told him what present she is excited about receiving this Christmas.
Vacationing at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, participated in the tradition of speaking with youngsters.
Asked by an 8-year-old girl in Kansas what she'd like Santa to bring, the answer came back, “Uh, not coal.”
Trump replied, “You mean clean, beautiful coal?," evoking a favoured campaign slogan he's long used when promising to revive domestic coal production, the Associated Press reported.
"I had to do that, I’m sorry,” Trump added, laughing and even causing the first lady, who was on a separate call, to turn toward him and grin.
“Coal is clean and beautiful. Please remember that, at all costs,” Trump said. “But you don’t want clean, beautiful coal, right?”
“No,” the caller responded, saying she'd prefer a Barbie doll, clothes and candy.
“Well, candy is good. Candy is good…. you eat as much as you want. Be healthy, okay?” the president said.
Moments earlier, Trump told Jennifer, 10, of Oklahoma, who phoned in with her four-year-old sister Anastasia, that he was protecting them against a “bad Santa.’
“We track Santa all over the world. We want to make sure that Santa is being good. Santa’s a very good person," Trump said while speaking to kids ages 4 and 10 in Oklahoma.
“We want to make sure that he’s not infiltrated, that we’re not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa,” Trump said.
“So we found out that Santa is good. Santa loves you. Santa loves Oklahoma, like I do,” Trump added, before promising the children that “Santa is going to bring you the most beautiful doll house you’ve ever seen.”
Meanwhile, when an 8-year-old from North Carolina, asked if Santa would be mad if no one leaves cookies out for him, Trump said he didn't think so, "But I think he’ll be very disappointed.”
“You know, Santa’s — he tends to be a little bit on the cherubic side. You know what cherubic means? A little on the heavy side,” Trump joked. “I think Santa would like some cookies.”
Trump has often marked Christmases past with criticisms of his political enemies, including in 2024, when he posted, “Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics."
During his first term, Trump wrote online early on December 24, 2017, targeting a top FBI official he believed was biased against him, as well as the news media.
But Trump was in a jovial mood this time. He even said, I “could do this all day long,” but likely would have to get back to more pressing matters like efforts to quell the fighting in Russia’s war with Ukraine.