Ever since Donald Trump was elected president, the Christian right has been extremely excited to celebrate Christmas, with a man finally leading the nation who gets that the holiday is really about the birth of Jesus. And last night, conservative firebrand Ann Coulter felt the need to lecture a random Twitter account about the true tale of Christmas. Except she missed a crucial detail.
It all began when an account tweeted out an impish meme about the Christian Lord.
Don’t forget to hate refugees as you set up a nativity scene celebrating a middle eastern couple desperately looking for shelter pic.twitter.com/O9tNjG7Sb3
— UndocuMedia (@undocumedia) December 25, 2017
Whether UndocuMedia is actually calling Jesus a refugee is not clear, but it’s no doubt just a cheeky take on the irony of… well, everything these days. Which Coulter took offense to.
Mary and Joseph weren't refugees, you illiterate. They were going to Bethlehem TO REGISTER WITH THE GOVERNMENT. https://t.co/3kGMYvE3DD
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) December 26, 2017
Which… again, there’s definitely a better way to spend Christmas fighting with a meme, but whatever. The more important part of all this is what happens in the Bible immediately after Jesus was born, from the Gospel of Matthew.
When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
They were forced to flee! They almost instantly became refugees the moment their child was born, a fact Twitter was swift to note to Coulter.
https://twitter.com/DaniArgTG/status/945535398062813185
https://twitter.com/ebruenig/status/945532799976656896
https://twitter.com/j2dk/status/945567428322324482
That’s also a take that doesn’t align with the leader of Catholicism, the pope, who in his Christmas address compared the plight of Mary and Joseph to that of migrants in the modern day.
“So many other footsteps are hidden in the footsteps of Joseph and Mary. … We see the tracks of entire families forced to set out in our own day. We see the tracks of millions of persons who do not choose to go away, but driven from their land, leave behind their dear ones.”
Perhaps proudly getting to say “Merry Christmas” isn’t the truest joy of the Trump presidency, but rather everyone getting to be willfully ignorant about the world.