Newsbusters:
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
Liberals are ruining Thanksgiving with the constant whining and PC poppycock bull twaddle look how the yave ruined everything these darn liberals
@Spurwing Plover:
There’s no real difference, they ruin every day with their crap if we let them.
I was doing just fine until he got about 2 minutes and 15 seconds into his Thanksgiving message to the troops.
Large family gathering, too busy catching up on real life to chat about politics. My Nephew and his wife expecting twins, my niece introduced her BF an nice boy a computer engineering major, kids all getting so big. new jobs, remodeling, new cars, hunting, black friday deals ect….
I think if any liberals bring up Trump with any informed conservatives, Thanksgiving would definitely be ruined for the ignorant liberals.
Actually, the butt-hurt liberals in our family (including my wife’s own twin sister and her husband) have decided not to risk having to defend their positions and simply avoided the usual large family get together we have had for the 42 years we have been married. The only people for whom Thanksgiving was ruined was those who ruined it for themselves. My wife’s parents are 82 and 84 and won’t be around for too many more holidays, yet these liberals would rather sequester themselves rather than have to possibly defend their own positions or be around people who refuse to think as they do.
I have a pretty good idea how the Mater and Pater thought about being discarded in favor of political stupidity, but my Thanksgiving was all the better for it. More coconut pie for me.
But, of course, it is Trump’s fault.
And now that a Republican holds the office of President, the MSM is trotting out all of the homeless stories that they’ve ignored for the past 8 years.
*sigh* So predictable.
@Petercat: There are lots of reasons for being homeless, some actually choose it. Many too mentally ill to deal with society, some just need a chance. Utopia will never exist under any political system.
I had a great day. do not read Politico for the last six years of the left bashing America. GQ, well, like the slime, wopo, and the wsj just trash. About 10 years moved to foreign news papers, they give a better picture of the world and have a different spin on events in America. I find induced vomiting on liberals when Trump bashing occurs. even notice how illiterate and dumb liberals are?
It’s always interesting to go to Real Clear Politics and view the hysterical headlines from the lefty “news” sites (i.e fake news). They are becoming more unhinged by the day.