(Washington) Donald Trump took advantage of the tradition of pardoning turkeys before Thanksgiving on Tuesday to attack his Democratic political opponents, sometimes in an insulting tone.
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The American president, instead of delivering a good-natured and apolitical speech as is customary, violently attacked the local authorities of Chicago, a city according to him plagued by “out of control” crime.
He twice called the governor of Illinois, the state in the Great Lakes region where Chicago is located, JB Pritzker a “disgusting lump”.
PHOTO CARLOS BARRIA, REUTERS ARCHIVES
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.
Donald Trump also assured that the city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, had a “low intelligence quotient”.
The president began by saying that he would have liked to give the two birds chosen to benefit from his clemency the names of two figures of the Democratic Party, the former leader of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and the current leader of the Democratic senators, Chuck Schumer.
“The turkeys pardoned today are called Gobble and Waddle,” recalled Donald Trump at the start of his speech.
Only Gobble, a turkey as imposing as it was impassive, attended the ceremony.
I was going to name them Chuck and Nancy, but I realized I could never pardon them.
Donald Trump, President of the United States
The presidential pardon of two turkeys is one of the rituals associated with the Thanksgiving holiday, which takes place on Thursday and is one of the most important occasions for family reunions in the United States.
Turkey is the iconic dish of Thanksgiving.
The 79-year-old Republican also attacked his predecessor Joe Biden, whom he referred to with the nickname “Sleeping Joe”.
“He used a signing machine to pardon the turkeys last year,” he said, assuring that the pardons were therefore “invalid” and specifying that he had reinstated them a posteriori, sparing a disastrous fate for the two birds concerned.
The American president often assures that Joe Biden, affected according to him by senility, would have been incapable of governing and that his entourage therefore used a machine imitating his signature.
In the gallery surrounding the Rose Garden of the White House, where Tuesday’s ceremony took place, Donald Trump has hung a gallery of portraits of American presidents in gilded frames. That of Joe Biden is replaced by a black and white photo of a signing machine.
