Let’s Make This a Trump-Free Thanksgiving

We can do it together, if we try.

This week, former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway — who follows me on Twitter, hi, Kellyanne — gave a particularly illustrative quote. Discussing her former boss’ desperate, almost depraved need for attention, she said:

“This will be the sixth consecutive Thanksgiving where Trump talk will be on the menu,” Kellyanne Conway, a former counselor to the president, told The Atlantic’s Peter Nicholas. “People are still obsessed with him.”

After several fraught Thanksgivings in a row, for reasons ranging from Trump to the pandemic to Trump to the pandemic and Trump, I think I feel comfortable making a proclamation here: Six consecutive Thanksgivings of families having to talk about Donald Trump is way too many Thanksgivings. I suspect this is the sort of proclamation that has more bipartisan support than one might immediately suspect. Even a large percentage of people that voted for Trump — 70 million of you, I’m reliably informed — are surely tired of talking about Trump every single conversation now. This is one of the primary reasons, I’d argue, that 2021 has been better, or at least more tolerable, than 2020 for most Americans, even with inflation and shipping delays and Covid-19 surges: Without Trump in our ear every goddamned second, it just feels a little calmer. We know he’s coming back. We can hear him braying and stomping in the distance. But it’s nice to have it, for the first Thanksgiving since 2015, a little bit dimmer — a little bit more faint. It won’t last, I’m sure. But I bet more people appreciate the quiet than probably shows up in your average Joe Biden approval poll.

This is what Trump wants, of course: His oxygen is our attention. Which is why Conway’s quote has a hint of wishcasting to it. It’s undeniable that Trump has been at the center of every Thanksgiving since 2015. That year it was about his crazy run for the Republican nomination; the next year was the continued shock that he’d actually won. From 2017–2020, you couldn’t possibly ignore him: He was the President, after all, even if most conversations about him last Thanksgiving revolved around his sad, disturbing attempts to hang onto his office even though he’d just lost an election. (We were just a couple of weeks out from the Four Seasons Total…