Thanksgiving on Thin Ice

The president’s rambling turkey-pardon monologue shows a mind slipping its moorings, and a nuclear arsenal still at his fingertips.

It starts, as these things so often do now, with home décor. The president steps out on the South Lawn, not to talk about wars or famines or mass deportations, but to brag that he’s had the grass ripped up so no one’s shoes get muddy at the turkey pardon. He lingers on the new patio like an HGTV host who accidentally seized nuclear codes, proudly announcing, “I hope you like our new beautiful patio with matching stone to the White House,” and assuring everyone that if he hadn’t remodeled the place, “you’d be sinking into the mud like they’ve done for many years.” The first message of the day is clear: nothing says “normal democracy” like tearing up the lawn so your donors don’t sink into it while you rant about crime.

From there, the ceremony swerves into the kind of alternate universe where the national debt, the criminal code, and the fate of two confused birds are all part of the same psychic weather system. He wishes everyone a “very, very happy Thanksgiving,” immediately informs us that the economy is doing “better than we’ve ever done before,” and rebrands the turkey pardon as a geopolitical crisis. Before he can even get to Gobble and Waddle, he breaks in with: “I want to make an important announcement.”

And what a Thanksgiving announcement it is.