Mary Geddry watched the Turkey Pardon ritual so we didn't have to.
CONTENT WARNING: This is a real downer, and it’s just five paragraphs from the entire article.
“As all of this unravels, the turkey psychodrama, the imaginary borders sealed to perfection, the SWAT-team-for-my-girlfriend subplot, the re-litigation of last year’s poultry, the self-contradictions delivered back-to-back without a blink, it’s impossible to ignore the larger, more chilling truth hovering behind every one of these public appearances. This isn’t just chaos; it’s disorganization. Deep, unspooling, unmistakable disorganization from a man who holds the nuclear codes.
“Every part of that turkey-pardon performance ricocheted like a pinball machine on the fritz: One moment he’s bragging about patio stones, the next he’s invalidating ceremonial pardons, then he’s insisting the border is at ‘zero,’ then he’s ranting about Chicago murders, then he’s praising a prison in El Salvador, then he’s promising $2 gas, then he’s declaring he ended ‘eight wars in nine months,’ then he’s doing stand-up about fat governors. It’s not just off-topic; it’s untethered. The through-line isn’t policy; it’s impulse.
“And that’s the part that should keep everyone up at night. We’re not watching a man who loses the plot. We’re watching a man who no longer seems aware that plots exist. This is someone who jumps between fantasies, vendettas, hallucinated statistics, and self-congratulation with the ease most of us change radio stations. That is frightening enough at a Thanksgiving sideshow. It is catastrophic when the same man can, on a whim or a misunderstanding or a perceived insult, initiate decisions with global consequences measured not in ‘crime statistics’ but in megatons.
“There’s a point where this stops being funny, even in a country that copes with gallows humor as a national pastime. There’s a point where the disjointedness stops being a quirk and becomes a risk. We passed that point a long time ago. What we saw at the turkey pardon wasn’t just a rambling holiday speech; it was a man broadcasting, openly and without disguise, that he is no longer capable of holding a coherent idea for more than thirty seconds.
“The danger is that the most disorganized speaker in American public life remains the one person empowered to make the kind of decisions you need absolute clarity for.”
“Thanksgiving on Thin Ice” by Mary Geddry from Geddry’s Newsletter, 11/25/2025
