Turkey, Football, Tariffs: That's What Thanksgiving Is About

My core Thanksgiving memories include the following: Watching the Dolphins pull out a miraculous Turkey Day win against the world-beating Dallas Cowboys thanks to Leon Lett being a big dummy, the time I blocked my cousin face first into a gigantic mud puddle during a backyard touch football game, and hearing my uncle, tipsy after a few high balls, lose his mind over Joe Kennedy. 

Not Jack Kennedy. Not Bobby Kennedy. Not even Ted Kennedy. These guys, I knew even at the tender age of 12, were common foes of all Republicans, especially the ones who gathered every year for my family Thanksgiving in North Carolina. None of the Kennedy boys drew my uncle’s ire that afternoon. It was their father, Joe, who made my dear uncle – blessed with the courage that only liquor can provide – rant and rave. 

Thanks to all those who support BFT. Consider subscribing for $3 or $5 a month, or leaving a tip!

I don’t recall exactly what Joe Kennedy had done to make my uncle so full of rage. I remember something about his work at the SEC – he was the agency’s first commissioner – and the Kennedy family mysteriously getting mega-wealthy during the Great Depression. As my uncle ranted, I was sure he was the last American to be mad at Joe Kennedy, who had been dead and buried for a quarter century. I wondered if he only did this Joe Kennedy bit when the high balls had landed, or if there was a sober version I could get on video tape. 

There was another Thanksgiving where my elderly great aunt, a kindly woman who was never anything but sweet to me and my brother, cried during the pre-meal prayer at the mention of the president (Bill Clinton) degrading the highest office in the land by getting head from an intern. I thought that to be a strange thing to cry about. My dad had told me Clinton’s philandering was the price of doing business for the best economy of his lifetime. But there was my aunt, such an unfailingly nice lady – someone who would really listen to you with her whole self – shedding tears about this one sex act in the Oval Office. So it goes. 

Tariffs, Tariffs, Tariffs

I doubt there are folks on the left desperate to engage in political discourse around the Thanksgiving table this week. Thanksgiving food is bad enough. To mix fascist-era political talk with turkey (bad) and cranberry sauce (bad) would be tantamount to self harm. This is not a call for you to do politics while choking down this horrid food.

A moment of sheepishly hawk a product I use frequently, and one that's 30 percent off this week when you use promo code DENNY30: Presleep, a natural and easy way to ease into sleepiness if you, like me, struggle with bouts of sleeplessness.

Engaging with right-wing family members foaming at their smiling mouths after Donald Trump’s election win sounds like something the devil would make you do for eternity if you spent your life trying to trick senior citizens out of money or rooting for the Cowboys. Debate the flat tax with Uncle Al for the rest of time, Satan says with a smirk. Talk to your grandmother about gender fluidity and performative gender politics, Lucifer declares. Get screamed at by your young Republican cousin about diversity initiatives as state-sanctioned racism against white Americans. Nothing sounds worse. Give me the lake of fire instead. I’m a pretty good swimmer.

There is one percolating political development that you can and maybe should bring up if your blackpilled family members leave you no choice but to talk politics (in a world with curated political realities, this becomes more maddening all the time). Talk to your people about tariffs, specifically the tariffs Trump and his Project 2025 soldiers want to implement the minute he’s sworn into office. 

The thing you need to first know about tariffs is that no one knows what they are. They’ve heard the word come out of the Big Boy’s disgusting little mouth, sure, but there isn’t a single American who can properly define a tariff because we are all intentionally misinformed by a media apparatus that actively undermines any effort to create an engaged citizenry. Hence, we have an actual insurrectionist winning the presidency and no one knows how anything works. 

How, you ask, can I be so certain that Americans have no conception of tariffs or their effects? Well. 

I thought the Harris campaign did a fine job of simplifying tariffs for a hopelessly misinformed electorate, but then again, I was wrong about the Harris campaign quite a bit during the summer and fall. Kamala Harris during her lone debate with Big Boy described Trump’s tariffs as the “Trump tax” on imports coming from Mexico and Canada and China. 

Trump of course pushed back on this framing, falsely claiming that tariffs punished foreign nations, not consumers. So one candidate correctly says the price of tariffs will entirely fall on Americans and the other says it won’t. Who is to say which is right or wrong? Good and bad things are the same. More at 11. 

The “Trump tax” attack didn’t land and the Harris folks moved on to Liz Cheney, who everyone hates. 

Probably all this tariff shit is bluster, but if it’s not, working class and middle class Americans are about to be crushed by skyrocketing prices on every product that comes across the border. After appointing tariff-obsessed dudes to key positions in his incoming administration, Trump on Monday night belched out something about 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico and 10 percent tariffs on Chinese imports. All the Americans who voted for fascism in November because eggs used to be expensive would be in for the rudest awakening possible – a bucket of ice water dumped directly on your face during a lovely afternoon nap. 

These tariffs are nothing short of political suicide and likely won’t happen. Naturally, Trump and his cronies are operating in bad faith here, pretending they have no choice but to implement tariffs to keep Americans safe from migrants and drugs crossing both the southern and northern borders. Tariffs won’t have any effect on any of that shit and Trump knows it. He’s a showman and this is part of the show. 

How To Talk To An Economic Doomer

One strategy for convincing someone that the economy is actually good is to get directly in front of their face and spout off economic data and measurements until spittle is raining down on the skeptic. If you go on long enough – if you cite enough valid statistics that demonstrate a

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

The mere suggestion that Americans should have to pay the price for Trump’s desire to bully neighboring countries should be planted in the heads of your family members though. In case some kind of tariffs come to pass and the price of everything spikes in the first few months of 2025, people need to know the cause. It didn’t just happen. It was not an act of a vengeful God. Mexico and Canada and China did not propose this, and Democrats – abiding by the bold strategy of sitting back and doing nothing – had nothing to do with it. 

I think there will be political opportunity for the left in the next year or two as disastrous federal policymaking wreaks havoc on those who voted for Trump because groceries got pricey under Biden. They ignored his fascistic threats and horrifying blood-and-soil ravings and cast a vote for him because they wanted a gallon of milk to return to its pre-COVID price (it won’t, but it’s important to have dreams). Talking to them during Thanksgiving about the (possibly) coming tariffs and their disastrous effects, could, just maybe, pay off down the line. 

Back in the early days of the Biden administration, I talked with a couple conservative family members about how the Republican tax bill passed in 2017 had cost my family dearly by eliminating the mortgage interest tax deduction. I don’t want to exaggerate: This change did not put us in the poorhouse, but it was a major fucking change to our tax burden. 

Their response to this was to ask why Democrats would pass such a bill. I smiled and waited for them to say sike. Please say sike. They did not. I reiterated that the 2017 tax cuts for billionaires was entirely a Republican law signed by Trump. They glanced at each other and shook their heads like robots unable to compute a new input. 

“Why would Republicans do that,” one of them said. “They’re the working class party.” 

My will broken, I asked if they had watched last night’s game. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social