A Very Stable Thanksgiving

Turkey up 40%, truth down 100%, Trump’s America serves us another helping of fiction.

Good morning! Pull up a chair, pour something strong, and prepare to give thanks, not for abundance, but for the rich feast of delusion we’ve been served by the Trump administration this week. It’s shaping up to be a Thanksgiving of thin gravy and thick hypocrisy, a national meal where the rising price of turkey can barely keep apace with the president’s lies.

Before leaving Palm Beach, Donald Trump held what can only be described as a press gaggle for the ages, the kind of spectacle that leaves even the Secret Service reaching for Tums. Standing before reporters with the confidence of a man who’s never read a balance sheet or a calendar, Trump declared, “Our prices are coming down very substantially on groceries.” He assured the gathered press that Walmart had confirmed this economic miracle and that a Thanksgiving meal is now “25 percent lower than it was under the Biden administration.” This, of course, is false. Gobble-gobble-grade nonsense.

In reality, the Department of Agriculture reports turkey prices up forty percent from last year, the largest jump since the great bird flu outbreak of 2015. Beef’s up fifteen percent. Canned vegetables are pricier thanks to those steel and aluminum tariffs Trump slapped on earlier this year, a move so brilliant that even his economic advisers had to pretend to be on mute during meetings. Trump now says he’s rolling some of those tariffs back “to help families,” which is a bit like an arsonist promising to put out the fire, next week, if the polls look bad.

Economist David Ortega of Michigan State University offered the most restrained academic translation of this chaos: removing tariffs might “slow down the increase in prices.” Translation for the rest of us: you’ll still overpay for the turkey, just slightly less dramatically, and you’ll have Trump to thank for that modest “achievement.”

Trump wasn’t done. He used the same gaggle to pivot to Venezuela, Jeffrey Epstein, Nick Fuentes, and Marjorie Taylor Greene in under five minutes, a sort of verbal triathlon of paranoia, misogyny, and projection. When a reporter mentioned Greene’s claim that her life was in danger, Trump replied, “I don’t think anybody cares about her.” Which, to be fair, may be the first bipartisan statement of his career.

Pressed on the Epstein files, Trump snarled that talk of Epstein was a “deflection” from his “tremendous success”, before muttering the tell of the week: “I don’t know what they may have added to the files.” And there it is. The preemptive disclaimer, the built-in conspiracy clause. If something ugly emerges, he’s already declared it forged by Democrats. If it doesn’t, he’ll claim he’s been cleared. It’s the same move every mob boss makes before a subpoena, call it the “I don’t know that guy, but if I did, he was great” defense.

Within hours, Trump reversed his position on the House vote to release the Epstein files, urging Republicans to support it “because we have nothing to hide.” Sure. He’s not fighting transparency; he’s choreographing it. After weeks of leaning on GOP members to bury the measure, he flipped only once Pam Bondi’s DOJ had time to quietly scrub or reclassify the incriminating parts. Now he can grandstand about “openness” while his lawyers file redactions in triplicate. It’s government by optical illusion, all light, no transparency.

Meanwhile, the broader economy keeps gasping for air. Trump insists inflation is “down to a normal level,” even as households brace for the most expensive Thanksgiving since the Nixon administration, and not for lack of domestic production. His immigration policies are choking the labor pipeline just as his tariffs punish supply chains. Case in point: international student enrollment dropped seventeen percent this fall, the steepest non-pandemic decline in over a decade. Universities are hemorrhaging revenue, research programs are losing grad assistants, and the U.S. economy is down another $1.1 billion this year.

Fanta Aw of NAFSA summed it up in one heartbreaking line: “The U.S. is no longer the central place that students aspire to come to.” Under Trump, even ambition is being deported. The same country that once lured the brightest minds with promise and freedom now greets them with backlogs, suspicion, and bureaucratic barbed wire. Not to worry, you can always get a 25% cheaper Thanksgiving meal at the imaginary Walmart in Trump’s mind.

So as we approach the holiday, it’s worth reflecting on what kind of “affordability” this administration has really given us. Affordable truth? No. Affordable education? Not anymore. Affordable turkey? Only if you catch one yourself and hope the game warden’s still furloughed. The only thing that’s truly affordable in Trump’s America is the cost of shame, and he’s distributing that for free, wholesale, straight from Palm Beach.

As for me, Marz and I plan to steal a couple of hours of beach time today. It’s that or he’ll keep pestering me until he tries to climb into my lap, not an easy maneuver for a 140-pound mastiff with boundary issues. Given how everything from turkey to dog food has gone up this year, maybe it’s time for him to slim down anyway. The price of loyalty, like everything else in 2025, just keeps rising, but at least he never lies about it.