Trump's inconceivable botch exposes a truly frozen heart

At the White House Congressional Christmas Ball last week, Donald Trump appeared to forget he was Barron Trump’s father. Pointing to the first lady, Melania Trump, the President mused, “She's got a wonderful boy and she's very proud of her boy.”

It was an unintentionally telling moment from a man whose instinct toward children seems to extend little beyond neglect and nonplussedness.

A few nights before his White House slip, in a campaign-style rally in Pennsylvania meant to soothe worries about affordability, Trump offered what might be the holiday season’s strangest piece of shopping advice: maybe children should be happy with two or three dolls instead of 37, and only one or two pencils, instead of dozens.

It wasn’t the first time Trump showed his weird obsession with dolls and pencils. The supplicant crowd cheered. Why?

The repeat of rationing showed Trump to be as hollow as a chocolate Santa. If he can joke about skimping on pencils and dolls while claiming to care about children’s futures, imagine how little room he has in his two-size-too-small Grinch heart?

But even the plucky Grinch, he is not. Trump is a miserly, cold-hearted, selfish old man, more akin to Ebenezer Scrooge.

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol as a moral warning: ignore children’s needs, and society withers. Trump is like the withered Scrooge. During the holidays, he’s more likely to don a pointy nose and top hat than a white beard and stocking cap.

‘If he be like to die… decrease the surplus population’

Scrooge said it, with a sneer. Trump has governed it, with a shrug.

Start with the shivering tale that he once told his own brother his developmentally disabled child should be allowed to die.

For Trump, if you sit in a wheelchair, are under gender-affirming care, or are a child from a “sh–hole country,” you belong not to man, but to Scrooge’s slums.

It’s everywhere in Trump’s policies.

LGBTQ+ teen suicide-prevention resources were removed from federal guidance. Childhood vaccine programs were targeted for elimination. Budgets for early education, child abuse prevention, foster-care support, and low-income child care were slashed or left to rot.

None of it was accidental. None of it was benign. It was the quiet arithmetic of a man convinced vulnerable kids are just line items, dragging down the bottom line.

‘Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?’

Trump doesn’t need prisons and workhouses. He had ICE.

Under Trump, migrant children are treated like problems to be managed, not children fleeing terror or poverty. The U.S. has reached record-high youth detention numbers. ICE officers menace schools, traumatizing kids in front of teachers and peers — because nothing says “ba-humbug” like traumatizing eight-year-olds.

The images that have ricocheted around the world — toddlers in chain-link pens, infants in court without parents — were not errors. They were the intended byproduct of a system engineered to be cruel enough to scare other families away.

Scrooge threatened the poor with workhouses. Trump built his modern version, and filled it with children.

‘Beware this boy — Ignorance’

Dickens personified Ignorance and Want as ghosts. In Trump’s Washington, they are budget priorities.

From day one, Trump treated children’s education like miserly Scrooge’s money ledger.

Deep cuts to low-income school programs? Check. Hollowing out the Department of Education’s ability to distribute Title I funds? Check. Using the “Big Beautiful Bill” to gut after-school programs, safety-net health services, and supports for abused or neglected kids? Triple check.

If kids stay desperate, they stay invisible. And invisible kids don’t trouble the grown-ups in the gold-plated Oval Office or a White House Ballroom for white adults only.

This Scrooge won’t change

Trump is a far lesser man than Scrooge, because at least Scrooge realized he was wrong.

Trump has spent years proving he doesn’t see a problem. His bizarre rationing examples about dolls and pencils, offered in lieu of genuine empathy or solutions, are perfect metaphors for a presidency that tells parents to tighten their belts while telling children they don’t count.

Trump’s policies toward kids — immigrant kids, disabled kids, LGBTQ+ kids, poor kids, kids with no lobbyists, no donors, no microphones — paint a portrait of a leader whose concern for the next generation ends at the edge of his own self-interest.

If Dickens wrote Trump into A Christmas Carol, the ghosts would have gone to the next house. They’d know better than to waste time trying to thaw a cold, measly heart that keeps choosing ICE.

• John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”