Here’s What President Trump Was Doing Over the Thanksgiving Holiday

Tweeting.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

While millions of people spent time with their loved ones over the Thanksgiving holiday, maybe doing a little shopping on Black Friday, President Trump spent the last few days firing off tweets about Chief Justice John Roberts, global warming, the media, and immigration. 

On Wednesday night, two days before his administration dropped a damning climate report which warns that the planet will be three degrees warmer by 2100, the president tweeted a blatantly false myth about climate change.

Whenever it’s unusually cold, as it was for much of the Eastern United States on Thanksgiving day, the most determined climate deniers announce the cold weather disproves that global warming is real. Trump said the same thing during a 2017 cold snap

On Thanksgiving day, Trump resumed attacking Chief Justice John Roberts and the Ninth Circuit. In a rare response from a Chief Justice to a President, Justice Roberts criticized Trump for calling a federal judge who ruled against the administration’s asylum policy, an “Obama judge.” Roberts said there were no such thing as Obama judges or Bush judges, but that these judges were independent. 

Trump responded via tweet, “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges.'”

The president further described the Ninth Circuit as a “disaster” and said that if law enforcement officials aren’t able to do their jobs there will be “bedlam, chaos, injury, and death.”

On Black Friday Trump took a shot at the media in response to a Wall Street Journal story describing his dissatisfaction with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. According to the report, Trump isn’t happy with Jerome Powell, Mnuchin’s pick for chair of the Federal Reserve because  he has been raising interest rates, an economic move the president worries will hurt his 2020 re-election campaign. According to the president, the story is riddled with “phony sources” and “jealous people.”

The president’s Twitter account appears to be quiet for now…but there’s always Sunday. 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate