President Donald Trump staged the White House’s annual turkey pardon on Tuesday, Nov. 25, and the ceremony weirdly doubled as a pseudo-comedic roast. He joked that he was re-pardoning last year’s birds because they, according to him, received only an “autopen” reprieve.
What Trump said at the Thanksgiving turkey pardon
He claimed the former president’s late-term orders were “totally invalid,” a line he used often enough that an autopen portrait replaced Biden’s official photo in one White House hallway.
Trump said, “The turkeys known as Peach and Blossom last year have been located, and they were on their way to be processed […] but I have stopped that journey, and I am officially pardoning them.” He added that the reprieve ensured they “will not be served as Thanksgiving dinner.”
Trump added that he had briefly considered naming this year’s turkeys “Chuck and Nancy,” a reference to Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. Their actual names are Gobble and Waddle.
Their arrival gave him another reason to take a swipe at political adversaries. “When I first saw their pictures […] I was going to call them Chuck and Nancy, but then I realized I wouldn’t be pardoning them. I would never pardon those two people,” Trump claimed.
The president takes aim at Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker
The president also riffed about his staff drafting mock paperwork to send Gobble and Waddle “straight through the terrorist confinement center in El Salvador, and even those birds don’t want to be there.”
Trump then shifted to a tense moment when referencing Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. The governor has been pushing back against the presence of ICE and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Illinois. In October, he signed an executive order to create the Illinois Accountability Commission, which will document what he called the agencies’ “unlawful attacks” within Illinois.
The president said that his team had written a joke for him about Pritzker. However, after hearing about the young woman who was set on fire on a Chicago train, he claimed he couldn’t. Instead, Trump said, “The mayor is incompetent, and the governor is a big fat slob.”
As White House reporter Philip Wegmann pointed out on X, “Trump calls Illinois Gov. Pritzker ‘a fat slob,’ but then he pauses and admits, ‘I’d like to lose a few pounds too by the way.’”
@YHyperbole joked, “Man finds his long-lost solitary crumb of self-awareness and promptly loses it again.”
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