President Donald Trump joked with a child calling the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) Santa tracker that coal is “beautiful,” playfully pushing back on the old holiday warning that naughty kids might find coal in their stockings.
“What would you like Santa to bring?” the 79-year-old president asked a child during a Christmas Eve call from Mar-a-Lago.
“Not coal,” the child, Amelia from Kansas, replied.
“Not coal? No, you don’t want coal… You mean, clean beautiful coal. I had to do that, I’m sorry,” Trump said. “Coal is clean and beautiful, please remember that—at all cost,” he added, laughing.
NORAD has fielded calls from children tracking Santa on Christmas Eve since 1955. This year, Trump participated in the 70-year tradition, taking calls alongside first lady Melania in a segment broadcast on C-SPAN.
Throughout the calls, Trump mixed in jokes and occasional political asides—comments that likely went over the heads of many of the young callers. His line about “clean beautiful coal,” for example, echoed his broader push to boost domestic energy production and lower prices by promoting fossil fuels.
The moment with Amelia wasn’t the only time Trump brought his own interests into the conversation. Speaking with a 5-year-old in Pennsylvania, he said: “Pennsylvania is great, we won Pennsylvania, actually three times. We won it in a landslide, so I love Pennsylvania.”
The article notes that Trump won the battleground state in November 2024 with 312 votes and 49.8 percent of the popular vote, compared with 226 votes and 48.3 percent for then-Vice President Kamala Harris. It also cites Pennsylvania’s prior results: in 2020, Joe Biden received 50.0 percent to Trump’s 48.8 percent, and in 2016, Trump carried the state with 48.6 percent over Hillary Clinton’s 47.9 percent.
In another call, a child from North Carolina asked whether Santa would be angry if he arrived to find no cookies. Trump responded that Santa likely wouldn’t get mad, “but he’ll be very disappointed,” adding, “Santa tends to be a little bit on the cherubic side… He’s a little on the heavy side.”
He encouraged the child to leave cookies, saying, “I think Santa has a serious appetite.”
That exchange spread widely online after Trump told an eight-year-old girl she sounded “so beautiful and cute,” and added that she sounded “so smart.”
In yet another moment, Trump explained to a child why NORAD tracks Santa: “We want to make sure that Santa is being good—that Santa is a very good person. We want to make sure that we’re not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa.”
Separately, the article says the White House reported that more than 605,000 people have been deported from the U.S. since Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025, and that another 1.9 million people in the country illegally have reportedly self-deported.
