Did you know that President Donald Trump has ruined Thanksgiving? That is the premise of Politico on Thanksgiving Day. Interestingly, GQ magazine proposes that if somehow your Thanksgiving is going great, that Trump should be injected into the conversations by angry liberals in order to ruin the event for everybody. GQ gives tips on performing this task in It's Your Civic Duty to Ruin Thanksgiving by Bringing Up Trump. Therefore it seems that the real Donald Trump is not the problem; only the weaponized Trump used by angry liberals to ruin what would normally be warm family feelings on Thanksgiving Day.
Before we get to GQ's tips for liberals on how to ruin Thanksgiving let us look at Politico's premise on How Donald Trump Ruined Thanksgiving:
In the 10 months since his inauguration, President Donald Trump has been accused of torching everything from America’s stature on the global stage to the country’s most treasured political norms. He “ruined the eclipse,” noted one observer; he “ruined all my favorite TV shows,” lamented another. He’s been accused of destroying workplace morale, irony and Bachelor in Paradise, too.
It’s only natural: To be a leader is to accept your fair share of blame, and then some. No doubt Americans will spend the next four to eight years debating whether or not the president trashed U.S. foreign policy and reality TV and everything in between. But a new study by economists Keith Chen of UCLA and Ryne Rohla of Washington State University seems to have proved at least one point conclusively: Trump really did ruin Thanksgiving.
In a few weeks we also expect the author of the piece, Derek Robertson, to write a followup called How Donald Trump Ruined Christmas.
To conduct their study, Chen and Rohla first established the cellphone users’ “home” location by tracking where their phone was most frequently between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m., then compared that with where they were between 1 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. Using election records compiled down to the precinct level, Chen and Rohla narrowed the sample to cellphone users who traveled to areas politically opposed to their own, in both 2015 and 2016. They narrowed that further to subjects who were in their “home” district during both the morning and evening of Thanksgiving, and therefore likely had control over the duration of their visit. The results show that those subjects chose to spend significantly less time at Thanksgiving dinner in 2016 than in 2015. The effect more than doubled in areas that saw heavy political advertising, confirming that the shortened family time was thanks to politics, and wasn’t just due to a countrywide epidemic of poor cooking. Chen says he and Rohla collected over 40 billion location “pings” in November 2016, compared to a smaller but methodologically comparable sample in 2015, to build their map of our post-election dinner anxiety.
Ah, using Big Data to try to make an anti-Trump point. Of course, another reason for spending less time at Thanksgiving dinner this year is that due to a surging economy under Trump, people have more disposable income and are anxious to make it out to the Black Friday weekend sales. It could also be that it is not Trump but really annoying liberals using their version of a weaponized Trump to ruin Thanksgiving dinners to such an extent that the normal people will want to leave early. This is what GQ magazine writer Joe Berkowitz is urging them to do in It's Your Civic Duty to Ruin Thanksgiving by Bringing Up Trump:
This Turkey Day, consider making life HELL for a few of your relatives.
Does Mr. Berkowitz still have any teeth yet after those angry encounters with his relatives?
It’s late-November 2017, and you know what that means: Every man you’ve ever seen on TV for any reason has just been unmasked as a woman-hating sewer ghoul. Also, it’s time to ruin your Trump-supporting family’s Thanksgiving—for America!
And now a few tips from Berkowitz on how to make yourself the most hated person in your extended family:
Here are a few suggestions for how to ruin Thanksgiving, arranged by ascending order of righteous fury:
Don’t show up. For some parents, your absence will speak louder than any sodden arguments over the density of pumpkin pie. If you can’t even look them in the eye, they’ll know you mean business. Besides, Friendsgiving rules.
Sorry, Joe, but even your friends probably find you annoying so in addition to not showing up... just stay home and eat a TV turkey dinner alone.
Show up and be kind of an asshole. No hugs; only stiff, formal handshakes. During the football game, talk about police brutality nonstop. Take any opportunity to emphasize just how much Bruce Springsteen and the entire E Street band loathes Trump. Come out as an aspiring professional DJ.
This should be an easy task for most liberals.
Scorched Earth. Not even a handshake; just stare, disgustedly, at their outstretched arms. Build a wall out of mashed potatoes. During the football game, order 10 Papa John’s pizzas—the official foodstuff of the alt right—and use them as pie charts to demonstrate who benefits most from the GOP tax plan. Refuse to be alone in a room with your mom, citing the Mike Pence rule. Call your parents by a Donald Trump nickname of your choosing—perhaps Little Rocket Mom or Liddle’ Dad. Insist on setting a place for Robert Mueller, the way Jews do for Elijah on Passover. Wear a coal miner hat for solidarity. Punch a cornucopia right in the mouth.
Um...Joe. After ruining your relatives' Thanksgiving dinner with your unhinged antics, guess who will be the one to be punched right in the mouth?
Exit question: Should Derek Robertson change the title of his Politico article to How Anti-Trump Liberals Ruined Thanksgiving?
