If my memory serves me correctly, it was on Christmas Eve in 1992 that I found out there was no Santa Claus.
I was a 10-year-old elementary school student in Austin, Texas, and although I had already debunked the existence of the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny, I had held onto Santa for as long as possible, apparently unready to relinquish my youth.
When I caught my parents in the act of delivering the gifts that had supposedly arrived from the North Pole, I cried.
Fast forward more than three decades, and many Americans are feeling similarly deceived this holiday season by another man in red – MAGA red to be precise.
As United States President Donald Trump nears the end of his first year back in office, he has neglected to deliver on pretty much all of his key promises aside from manic deportations, which have helped convert the country into a holly, jolly police state.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll put Trump’s approval rating at just 39 percent as Americans battle a staggering cost of living, including soaring prices for fruits, vegetables and meat as well as rising rents and electricity fees.
This year’s federal government shutdown saw millions of people facing the distinct possibility of starvation, an arrangement that was rather irreconcilable with the whole plan to “make America great again”.
Job losses as a result of the shutdown drove up the unemployment rate, which reached 4.6 percent, the highest in nearly five years. According to Reuters, “many economists think employers have pulled back on hiring because of what some described as shock from Trump’s tariffs on imports.”
From the perspective of reality, then, Trump has failed decisively in his pledge to fix the US economy. But in the president’s own personal world of hyperbolic make-believe, he has awarded the current economy a grade of “A+++++” while declaring the country’s alleged “affordability” crisis a Democratic “hoax” to taint his image.
To be sure, the United States has never been particularly known for its affordability. After all, that would defeat the whole point of cutthroat capitalism and the hierarchy of human life upon which plutocracy rests.
And while Republicans and Democrats may purport to be ideological opposites, the parties are two sides of the same coin in terms of perpetuating racialised elite tyranny and ensuring that poverty remains a leading cause of death in one of the richest nations on Earth.
I am presently visiting my mother for the holidays in the city of Louisville, Kentucky, where a trip to the supermarket the other day set us back $237.27 – ie, almost the equivalent of the monthly rent for my home on the beach in southern Mexico. Our shopping cart, which was not full, had one meat product and no alcoholic beverages.
Louisville, incidentally, was the site of the notorious March 2020 police murder of unarmed Black woman Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician. Earlier this year, the US Department of Justice sought a prison sentence of just one day for a former police officer convicted in Taylor’s shooting, which took place on the first Trump administration’s watch.
The officer ultimately received a slightly longer sentence of 33 months.
Indeed, if your holiday wish list happens to include an end to systemic racism or police brutality, you’ve got nothing but disappointment coming your way.
As for other contemporary Justice Department misdeeds, at least 16 files relating to the case of late financier and child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein inexplicably disappeared on Saturday from the department’s website shortly after they were published.
One of the disappeared items was a photograph of Trump, who previously slammed as a “Democrat hoax” the national uproar over the government’s efforts to stymie the release of documents pertaining to Epstein.
Other recently released documents have been heavily redacted or blacked out entirely, constituting “another slap in the face” to Epstein’s victims, as survivor Marina Lacerda put it.
In other words, the domestic panorama these days does not inspire much holiday cheer.
But there I go again propagating “hoaxes”.
Meanwhile, the festive season has also been a time for Trump’s continued wanton bombing of boats in the vicinity of Venezuela and the attendant extrajudicial killing of seafarers, supposedly in the name of combating Venezuelan “narcoterrorism”.
The US has now expanded its anti-Venezuelan repertoire to allow for the hijacking of oil tankers as well. For his part, Trump has amplified the list of fabricated casus belli with his patently absurd allegation on social media – in capital letters, as always – that the South American nation previously stole “Oil, Land, and other Assets” from the United States. On Thursday, in an interview with NBC, the president did not rule out war with Venezuela.
On the other side of the world, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians proceeds apace in the Gaza Strip under the guise of a Trump-brokered ceasefire. Like his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, Trump has showered billions of dollars in US taxpayer money upon the genocidal state.
Call it a massive stocking stuffer.
And as Christmastime comes and goes this year, ’tis the season to be anything but jolly.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.