Trump serves up gratitude, ridicule on turkey day
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — For his first Thanksgiving in office, President Donald Trump returned to the comforts of his civilian lifestyle: the luxury of his Palm Beach properties, complete with earlymorning Twitter commentary and a list of all the ways he — and, as a result, the country — is winning.
Trump started by wishing his 43 million followers a happy Thanksgiving, then recited a heaping helping of reasons the nation should be thankful.
“HAPPY THANKSGIVING, your Country is starting to do really well,” he wrote on Twitter. “Jobs coming back, highest Stock Market EVER, Military getting really strong, we will build the WALL, V.A. taking care of our Vets, great Supreme Court Justice, RECORD CUT IN REGS, lowest unemployment in 17 years…!”
In a video teleconference later Thursday morning, the president assured troops from the five branches of the military, stationed across the world, that they were “fighting for something real” and that “really good things” had happened with the country while they were overseas. More improvements, including “big, fat, beautiful tax cuts,” are to come, he said.
Speaking from a lavish room at Mar-aLago, the club that he and his staff have deemed “the Winter White House,” he applauded the progress he said was being made in Afghanistan and Iraq, adding that the gains made against the Islamic State in the past year exceeded those during “years of the previous administration.”
“We’re being talked about again as an armed forces,” he said as a few club members lingered outside. “We’re really winning. We know how to win. But we have to let you win. They weren’t letting you win before.”
He continued extolling the victories during a second event at a Coast Guard station in Riviera Beach. The first lady, Melania Trump, joined him to hand out sandwiches in the station’s mess hall. The first couple had also provided assortments of fruit, muffins and cookies to the service members, some of whom were about to go out on patrol.
Donald Trump, the master marketer, spoke of the Coast Guard in terms few presidents have used. “I think that there is no brand — of any kind, I’m not just talking about a military branch — that has gone up more than the Coast Guard,” Trump told the service members, citing what he described as the organization’s successful response to Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria this year. “Incredible people, you’ve done an incredible job, and I love coming here and doing this for you today.”
He noted orders for new military equipment, including Coast Guard cutters, Navy ships and Air Force planes, including one that is “almost like an invisible fighter.”
The president then returned to old holiday habits, leaving to spend a few hours at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach before returning to Mara-Lago, the club he owns, in an unusual fall rain.
The menu was to include traditional fare — turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes with marshmallows — as well as local produce, red snapper, Florida stone crab and a variety of baked goods, cakes and pies, according to a summary provided by Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady.
Trump’s time at Mar-a-Lago and his surrounding golf courses was not, the White House told reporters, merely leisure, but was filled with meetings and phone calls, a schedule that Trump emphasized on Twitter on Wednesday.
“Will be having meetings and working the phones from the Winter White House in Florida [Mar-a-Lago],” he wrote on Twitter before spending a few hours at his West Palm Beach golf course. Officials declined to say with whom the president spoke.
In the years since Trump renovated Mar-a-Lago, the former estate of cereal company heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, into an upscale club and resort, he has relished spending parts of the holiday season there, said Anthony P. Senecal, Trump’s former butler, who worked at the resort for more than 20 years. This visit was the president’s first to the club since April.
Peter Brock, a local real estate developer and a member of the club who has spent parts of the holiday season there in the past, said Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency had only elevated his star presence on the grounds.
“The bottom line is, he is always enthusiastic about coming home and seeing what he calls his people,” Brock said. “And for the most part, we are his people.”
But holiday or not, Trump is not one to pass up an opportunity to deliver a jab. In 2013, he offered these greetings on Twitter: “Happy Thanksgiving to all — even the haters and losers!” And on Thursday, he took aim at some of his favorite targets: the reporters trailing him for the duration of his Florida stay. “I’ll ask the press to get out, and I’ll say, ‘You’re fired,’ ” Trump said as reporters were ushered out of the Mara-Lago teleconference. “And, by the way, media, happy Thanksgiving, I must say.”