‘He’s a big fat slob’: Trump injects own brand of humour into beloved tradition

Washington: The presidential pardoning of a Thanksgiving turkey – an annual tradition going back to at least 1989 – is usually accompanied by a light-hearted speech featuring bad jokes and agonising puns.

“Yes we cran,” said Barack Obama, turning his campaign slogan into a popular turkey condiment. He mused that media training for a turkey, like a politician, involved “learning to gobble without really saying anything”.

By contrast, Donald Trump deployed his own brand of humour as he pardoned Gobble – a 23.5 kilogram bird from North Carolina – in the White House Rose Garden (Club) overnight.

It began with a familiar jab at his predecessor “Sleepy” Joe Biden, with Trump revealing Biden’s pardons for last year’s turkeys – Peach and Blossom – were invalid because he used an automatic pen.

Trump’s obsession with the so-called auto-pen scandal is unending. For those wondering: yes, Biden’s official portrait on the Rose Garden colonnade is still replaced by a picture of the pen in question.

He also hinted that the Department of Justice might actually take action to nullify some of Biden’s pardons. “I don’t know what you’re going to do about that,” he said to Attorney-General Pam Bondi in the audience.

After all, the administration has a report from Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, released last month, recommending the Justice Department “investigate all of former president Biden’s executive actions, particularly clemency actions”, to see whether they should be voided.

But Trump quickly moved on to another favourite punching bag: Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. The president resurrected his pitch to send the National Guard to Chicago, the country’s third-largest city, to tackle crime, despite Pritzker’s opposition.

“The people of Chicago want us to go there,” Trump said. “[Crime] is out of control, the mayor is incompetent, and the governor is a big fat slob.”

There were tepid murmurs of laughter in the Rose Garden crowd. Trump, however, wasn’t done with Pritzker.

“I had a little bit of a Pritzker joke. I was going to talk about Pritzker and size. But when I talk about Pritzker, I get angry because he’s not letting us do the job. So, I’m not going to tell my Pritzker joke,” he said.

“Some speechwriter wrote some joke about his weight. But I would never want to talk about his weight. I don’t talk about people being fat. I refuse to talk about the fact that he’s a fat slob. I don’t mention it.

“I’d like to lose a few pounds too, by the way. And I’m not going to lose it on Thanksgiving, I can tell you that.”

Trump joked that the turkeys should be called Chuck and Nancy – a reference to Democrats Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi – or sent to the notorious mega prison in El Salvador where the administration deported about 250 Venezuelans earlier this year.

Under pressure to talk more about the cost-of-living concerns affecting average Americans, the president also rattled off a list of goods he said would cost less this Thanksgiving: turkey, potatoes, ham, eggs and gasoline.

In fact, according to the Department of Agriculture, the wholesale price of turkey meat is up from last year. But many supermarkets are offering deep discounts on turkeys, a reliable loss-leader, to get customers in the store.

The modern tradition of the president pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey began in 1989 under George H. W. Bush, though John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan also spared the birds rather than sending them to the dinner table.

The custom of presenting an official turkey to the occupant of the White House dates back much further. Since 1947, when Harry Truman was in office, the bird has been gifted by the National Turkey Federation.

And Civil War-era president Abraham Lincoln is credited with the first presidential turkey pardon - but it was at Christmas, and the spared bird was his son’s pet.

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