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.
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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.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
Q: Do you plan to attend Sarah's funeral? TRUMP: I
haven't thought about it yet, but it's certainly something I can conceive of. I
love West Virginia. You know, I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins
of any president anywhere.
Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:54:44 GMT
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.”
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.)
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
Q: Officials say the suspect in the DC shooting was
vetted & it came up clean TRUMP: He went cuckoo. He went nuts. There was no
vetting Q: Actually, your DOJ IG says there was thorough vetting of Afghans. So
why blame Biden? TRUMP: You're just asking questions because you're a stupid
person
Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:42:02 GMT
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.
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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.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
TRUMP: If you look at Somalia, they are taking over
Minnesota. REPORTER: What do the Somalians have to do with this Afghan guy who
shot the National Guard members? TRUMP: Ah, nothing. But Somalians have caused
a lot of trouble. They're ripping us off.
Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:46:29 GMT
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.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
Trump calls Tim Walz “seriously retarded”
Fri, 28 Nov 2025 04:34:57 GMT
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.
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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.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
Walz on calling for Trump to release MRI results:
"Here we got a guy on Thanksgiving where we spent time with our families,
ate, played Yahtzee. This guy is apparently in a room ranting. It's not normal
behavior. It's not healthy. Has anyone in history ever had an MRI & had no
idea what it was for?"
Sun, 30 Nov 2025 15:53:04 GMT
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.”
Republicans Against
Trumpism @rpsagainsttrump.bsky.social
Indiana Republican Sen. Mike Bohacek, who has a
daughter with Down syndrome, says he’ll vote No on redistricting following
Trump’s “retarded” slur at Gov. Walz.
Fri, 28 Nov 2025 21:32:16 GMT
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.
