WASHINGTON — President Trump hosted the annual turkey pardon at the White House on Tuesday — joking that he was also re-pardoning last year’s birds that only got an “autopen” reprieve and saying he considered naming this year’s gobblers “Chuck and Nancy.”
Former President Joe Biden “used an autopen for last year’s turkey pardons,” the president joked, calling them “totally invalid,” a contention he’s made of the Democrat’s late-term grants so often that an autopen portrait took the place of Biden’s picture in the White House photo gallery.
“The turkeys known as Peach and Blossom last year have been located and they were on their way to be processed … but I have stopped that journey and I am officially pardoning them, and they will not be served as Thanksgiving dinner,” he joked.
Turkeys named Gobble and Waddle, said to be the plumpest birds presented at the annual event, received this year’s pardons.
“When I first saw their pictures … I was going to call them [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck [Schumer] and [former House Speaker] Nancy [Pelosi], but then I realized I wouldn’t be pardoning them. I would never pardon those two people,” Trump joked, noting, “I wouldn’t care what Melania told me.”
Gobble and Waddle are the latest in Trump’s long list of second-term clemency grants, with roughly 1,700 pardons so far and many prison commutations, though the latest figures have not yet been posted.
“My more enthusiastic staffers were already drafting the paperwork to ship Gobble and Waddle straight through the terrorist confinement center in El Salvador, and even those birds don’t want to be there,” Trump went on, referring to his own deportation of migrants.
Trump said his team drafted a joke about Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker but he was too angry to read it after reading about a woman burned on a Chicago train, as Pritzker refuses Trump’s request for partnership on a federal-led crime crackdown.
“The mayor is incompetent and the governor is a big fat slob,” Trump said instead.
“Some speechwriter wrote some joke about his weight, but I would never want to talk about his weight, I don’t talk about people being fat. I refuse to talk about the fact that he’s a fat slob … I’d like to lose a few pounds too, by the way. And I’m not going to lose it on Thanksgiving.”
The president and first lady Melania Trump are slated to head to Mar-a-Lago to celebrate the holiday.
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