In the Before Times, the prospect of talking politics at Thanksgiving qualified as a major cultural anxiety. This was not really that long ago, but after these last few falling-down years, it feels both quaint and antique that assignment editors across the political spectrum were once so committed to helping readers through the trauma of talking politics with loved ones. (The stories themselves reliably missed the way that such Thanksgiving debates tend to occur, which is mostly between half-buzzed people who (1) only sort of know what they’re arguing about, and (2) are also watching the Detroit Lions’ punter bobble a snap while making their case.)
There’s nothing to be wistful about here, really, except for the now-antique presumption that the people on either sides of the debate would be speaking about things that the other might recognize. On the day before Thanksgiving, former President Barack Obama made a late contribution to the genre, tweeting, “Before arguing with friends or family around the Thanksgiving table, take a look at the science behind arguing better.” He linked to a Vox story headlined “Most People Are Bad at Arguing. These Two Techniques Will Make You Better.” Two hours earlier, current President Donald Trump had tweeted, without comment, a photo of his own scowling, honey-baked head superimposed onto an image of Sylvester Stallone’s gleaming and venous torso from one of the more overtly steroidal Rocky sequels. Even before Trump dialed every idiocy in the culture up, there was some obvious wish-casting built into the idea that compelling evidence-based arguments for the Affordable Care Act might prove effective on loved ones whose biases and media diets had led them to become very worried about whatever was supposed to be happening with Jade Helm.
By now, though, everyone who will ever know better surely does.
The discursive fantasies expressed in one president’s tweet are roughly as preposterous as those in the other, and each quite obviously exists on its own respective plane of reality. But let’s do our best to make this into a binary anyway. Obama suggests deploying some Freakonomics-scented tips and tricks and a leavening dose of Neibuhr-influenced humility to prove a point about Our Common Humanity. Tonally and gesturally, it is both the more traditionally presidential of the two and a perfectly crystalline expression of Democrat Brain, primarily because of how determinedly it ignores the actual state of play. Trump’s tweet is more overtly cringeworthy, in both the basic Uh Oh, Dad’s Doing Memes sense and because it is coming from a man who is literally the president. That said, its strident stupidity and staunchly humorless joke-adjacency make it more accurately aligned with how politics gets discussed in our Trumpy moment.
