Islamophobic National Security Adviser

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.

Scorched Earth. Not even a handshake; just stare, disgustedly, at their outstretched arms. Build a wall out of mashed potatoes…

http://www.breitbart.com/economics/2017/11/22/gq-magazine-urges-readers-trash-thanksgiving-trump-voters/

 

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!

Thanksgiving is a celebration of community and gratitude, where we reconvene in our nostalgia-drenched hometowns and perform time-honored traditions such as almost sleeping with your high school crush and going around the table to say what you’re most thankful for and where you were on 9/11. Last year’s Thanksgiving was a difficult time for most Americans—roughly 65.8 million of us. The election was still a fresh wound. Trump had begun assembling his Dr. Caligari cabinet of White House monsters, each one a direct fuck-you to some beloved ideal. There was the EPA chief who doesn’t believe in climate change, the labor secretary who opposed minimum wage increases, the flagrantly Islamophobic National Security Adviser who might just be a foreign agent, and at the helm of it all, a man who speaks almost exclusively in racist dog whistles and “locker room talk.” Thanksgiving was a cathartic vent sesh for liberals with like-minded families, and a painful twist of the knife for those without.

I was lucky, kind of. Both my family and my wife’s family were Hillary supporters. But we spent Thanksgiving 2016 at my parents’ house in Asheville, North Carolina—a city which, despite its Portlandia-esque sensibilities, was nestled in deep red territory. Walking around downtown, I saw more sentient MAGA hats in a few hours than I had in three long post-election weeks in New York. Right away, my dad informed me that some Trump supporter friends would be joining our Thanksgiving dinner. He assured me he’d politely asked them not to talk politics, and encouraged me to follow suit. I spent Thanksgiving dinner trying to guess which guests were the ones who voted for Trump, like the most embarrassing Agatha Christie mystery of all time. This armistice dinner went surprisingly smoothly, thanks to the politics ban and enough whiskey to ride out a prohibition crisis. It helped that these people were not my family. Whatever qualms I had with them outside of this holodeck simulation of a normal dinner would never come to a head, since we had no reason to be in regular contact. Also, Trump had not actually taken office yet.

Last year, Trump supporters could still make a case for impending change. Perhaps Donald would go through a molting phase, shedding his most intolerant and unstable parts like clumps of dead lizard skin. Instead, if anything, his reptilian hide got doused in nuclear waste and he has since Godzilla’d all over America’s purple mountain majesties. Anyone hoping for peace last Thanksgiving was rewarded with constant chaos, “very fine” Nazis marching in the streets, and a flame war with North Korea unfolding entirely over Twitter, which may or may not end in Armageddon.

This year, if you’re headed home to a household that still thinks a sex-offending game show host in rapid cognitive decline was the best choice for a president, it is your civic duty to filibuster Thanksgiving.

Trump has spent the entire year performing one long, clumsy touchdown dance atop the wreckage of America’s former norms and values. He turned the presidency into a haberdashery. He made nepotism a core hiring strategy. He attacked a civil rights leader during Martin Luther King Day. He politicized a Boy Scout jamboree. Any parents still riding the Trump Train at this point have thereby signaled that nothing is sacred. It is time to follow their example. They can’t stand idly by while President Deals tramples every other American tradition and yet somehow expect that Thanksgiving will be normal too. If every other moment of this year is going to be drastically out of whack, nobody should get to pretend that everything is normal for one meal just because that’s what the pilgrims would have done.

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.

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.

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.

Of course, this is about more than just spite—as satisfying as spite can be in these trying times. This is about potentially chipping away at the ~35 percent of un-budging Trump supporters. Sure, some of them are fully on board with every inexplicable decision, but others may be swayable. They are Fox News devotees who have simply internalized the message that all negative news about Trump is fake news. They know the president is unpopular, but they think his unpopularity is the strict province of haters and losers. It might be different when it’s their own child—who probablyisn’t an Antifa supersoldier and who definitely doesn’t have loser genes—weighing in with cold hard facts. Having a son or daughter loathe everything you’ve become is easier long distance; it’s another thing when that kid is staring turkey-carving daggers at you from across the table.

If your family is unmoved after a ruined Thanksgiving, though, that’s fine too. After all, next year’s Thanksgiving falls just after the 2018 midterms, and if your true believer parents still feel the way they do now, you might ruin their holiday in another way.