Trump's ugly Thanksgiving meltdown
It's getting so bad that even Republicans are starting to notice.
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Thanksgiving is supposedly a holiday devoted to welcoming family, friends, and guests to eat together. So of course President Donald Trump used it to indulge in a bizarre orgy of xenophobia and hate, culminating in a gutter attack on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who he referred to as “seriously retarded.”
Trump’s decision to “give thanks” by spewing bigotry and slurs is not a surprise. Even by his standards, though, his harangue was despicable. It was also a disgusting effort to leverage for partisan ends the shooting of National Guard members in Washington DC.
As his popularity and influence slips, Trump seems more and more desperate. That makes him more reckless and in many ways more dangerous. It also opens up opportunities for opposition, though — sometimes from unexpected quarters.
The worst person you know is president
Trump’s awful rant was inspired in part by a shooting on the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving.
An Afghan national who worked with the US in Kandahar and had been granted asylum in the US opened first on two members of the West Virginia National Guard who were patrolling in the city as part of Trump’s deployment of troops to US cities. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, has died. Andrew Wolfe, 24, is in critical condition as of this writing. The shooting suspect was quickly apprehended and is in custody; he has been charged with first degree murder.
Characteristically, Trump barely paused to comfort the victims or the nation, and instead made the terrible act of violence all about him.
Trump immediately resorted to incendiary rhetoric and bigoted fearmongering. He denounced the shooting as “an act of terror” — suggesting a political motive, though the shooter’s intentions are unknown. In fact, on Thanksgiving, Trump contradicted his own charge of “terror,” instead stating (also without a clear basis) that the suspect “went cuckoo. I mean, he went nuts. It happens too often with these people.”
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Of course, Trump doesn’t really care about the shooter’s intent or about providing the American people with accurate information. All he cares about is leveraging the incident for his policies and his power. He quickly froze all asylum claim decisions — a directive which left agencies and an untold number of desperate people in limbo.
The president also embraced his usual policy of passing the buck. He blamed the Biden administration for the shooting, specifically pointing to a program that allowed Afghans who had worked with US forces to seek asylum. Trump lied that these refugees were not vetted. When a reporter at a press availability on Thursday pointed out that his own Department of Justice said the Afghans had all undergone through vetting, Trump snapped that she was “just asking questions because you’re a stupid person.” (Further reporting has found that the shooter was in fact granted asylum by the Trump administration.)
If Trump had a good faith interest in preventing further attacks on the National Guard, he would of course want to address his own administration’s processes and figure out if something went awry. He might look, for example, at if the suspect was radicalized in the United States, and whether easy access to guns made the shooting possible. He could also reevaluate his choice of FBI Director Kash Patel, who made another clownish error in the wake of the shooting by announcing of the perpetrator that “they will be brought to justice” when in fact the (single) suspect was already in custody.
Perhaps most importantly, Trump could reevaluate his decision to deploy members of the National Guard into cities above the objections of local officials in order to escalate his incendiary and illegal deportation policies. One prominent theory among law enforcement currently working on the shooting, according to CBS, is that “the suspect suffered from paranoia and other mental health challenges that indicated he believed authorities sought to deport him from the US.” It’s easy to see how this could have been exacerbated by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, and how National Guard members could become a symbol of that policy for a disturbed individual.
Even if the shooter was not influenced by Trump’s policies, we know that Guard members would not have been harmed if Trump had not needlessly deployed them. Presidents who send troops into conflict are responsible when they are harmed. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge any duty of care for those he puts in harm’s way is among the most contemptible of his many contemptible traits.
Why are we talking about Minnesota?
We all know that Trump sees violence as an opportunity to push his own grudges. He doesn’t want there to be any doubt, though. So he responded to the tragic assault on members of the National Guard by demonizing Minnesota’s Somali immigrant population, which had absolutely nothing to do with the shooting.
During his aforementioned Thanksgiving press availability, Trump attacked Somalis in Minnesota, claiming that they are “ripping off our country and ripping apart that once-great state.” He also insulted Somalia, which he sneered has “no laws, no water, no military, no nothing.”
When a reporter asked Trump what the heck Somalis have to do with a shooter from Afghanistan, Trump admitted there is in fact no connection.
But that didn’t stop him from doubling down a short while later in a disgusting Thanksgiving Truth Social post in which he claimed refugees are “the leading cause of social dysfunction in America.” He denounced fictitious Somali gangs who he claimed were attacking people in Minnesota, insulted Gov. Walz, and attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar, falsely claiming she had come into the country illegally.
Trump also lied about Somali gangs being responsible for a wave of violence in the state. He of course did not mention the political assassination of Democratic Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman earlier this year by a Trump supporter.
Trump is panicking. And maybe facing consequences.
Trump is always vile and erratic. But spewing slurs on Thanksgiving, a day following the shooting of members of the National Guard, feels like an escalation even for him. It suggests he’s desperate to find his own Reichstag Fire — a violent incident he can use to rally his supporters and use as an excuse to target his enemies.
It’s not hard to figure out why Trump might be desperate. Republicans got crushed in elections last night month throughout the country and ever since his coalition seems to be coming apart. His own party revolted and forced him to agree to release files related to convicted sex offender and longtime Trump crony Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump’s poll numbers are dismal and getting worse. Gallup last week had his approval at 36 percent, a second term low.
Trump hopes to reverse his decline by becoming more and more divisive. This is terrible news for asylum seekers who he is threatening to deport back into the dangers they fled. It’s also terrible news for the Somali and Afghan communities, which may well face threats and violence from MAGA supporters because of Trump’s irresponsible and bigoted words.
But incendiary partisan rhetoric can backfire. Trump has been trying to pressure the Indiana GOP to pass an egregious new gerrymander of the state’s congressional districts ahead of the midterms. Republicans in the state are reluctant because gerrymandering is very unpopular, they worry that in a blue wave election cycle a gerrymander could backfire, and also maybe because some of them just think it’s wrong. Standing up to Trump means that they have gotten a slew of death threats; a number of them have been swatted.
Indiana Republican state Sen. Michael Bohacek had been cagey about his vote on redistricting. After Trump’s post using an ableist slur to attack Walz, though, Bohacek officially came off the fence. His daughter, he said, has Down syndrome.
“This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences,” Bohacek posted. “I will be voting NO on redistricting.” He added that Trump could “use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.”
Trump rarely faces direct consequences for his shameful rhetoric. That’s because in the past Republicans have largely refused to abandon him no matter what he says or does.
In defying the president specifically because of his cruelty — even though that cruelty was ostensibly directed at a Democrat — Bohacek is hopefully a sign that things are changing. But Trump’s increasingly ugly rhetoric and brutal policies suggest that even as his grip on his party slips, he will continue to harm vulnerable people and our democracy as long as he has any power at all.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Do we know where the polls are this morning in the TN-7th district race? Hopefully his deranged posts have pushed Aftyn Behn into the lead.❤️🤍💙 and Hegseth needs to be jailed…😡
The shooter of the National Guard troops did not just 'work with the US' in Afghanistan, he was part of what the CIA calls a “Zero Unit”—paramilitary forces trained and backed by American intelligence, aka death squads that routinely killed civilians. He may have participated in extrajudicial killings when he was still a teenager.
This relevant fact is being downplayed in a lot of US reporting, with euphemistic language like 'he worked with the CIA' or 'he was a member of an elite unit'.
A childhood friend of Lakanwal’s said he “suffered from mental health issues and was disturbed by the casualties his unit had caused.” His family told investigators he has PTSD from the fighting he did on our behalf.