CHRIS ROPER: Trump love means never having to say you’re sorry

It’s not really done to comment on the eccentricities of other countries, but one can’t help being mystified at the annual US presidential pardoning of a turkey. Yes, every year since the 1970s, the president has officially spared the life of a turkey, to great fanfare.

Even weirder is the fact that the “national Thanksgiving turkey presentation” at the White House, when the National Turkey Federation (NTF) presents the president with a live domestic turkey, has been taking place since the 1940s.

Traditions and national myths exist to reinforce a nation’s idea of itself, of course. What does the pardoning of the turkey signify? The beneficence of presidents? No. It’s a celebration of two things: the ease with which business can buy influence, and the ability of the state to deflect attention from its misdeeds by staging an alternative spectacle.

The official presentation of a turkey to the president each year began with president Harry Truman in 1947, though the White House Historical Association disputes this. It was part of a lobbying campaign by Big Chicken (that’s like Big Pharma, but with more drugs, mostly injected into the chickens). The Truman administration, to the outrage of the Poultry & Egg National Board and the NTF, had begun promoting “poultry-free Thursday”, for reasons that are too long to go into here.

The poultry industry pointed out that the three big upcoming turkey holidays (they use the term unironically) — Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year — were due to fall on a Thursday. Along with chickens, Big Chicken presented a turkey to Truman that December in an event that, as the White House Historical Association puts it, “promoted the poultry industry and established an annual news niche that endures today”.

You’ll be amused that the type of turkey presented for pardoning is usually “a male of the broad-breasted white variety”, which coincidentally is the dominant breed of humans pardoned by US President Donald Trump for the January 6 2021 riots at the Capitol.

On his first day in office this year, Trump pardoned all 1,500-plus people charged with the attack on the Capitol, “freeing from prison people caught on camera viciously attacking police”, as the Associated Press put it, “as well as leaders of far-right extremist groups convicted of orchestrating violent plots to stop the peaceful transfer of power after his 2020 election loss”.

Yes, it’s pardonin’ season in the US right now. One of the people up for help is the actor and antisemite Mel Gibson, who was convicted of domestic violence in 2011. The antisemite bit is important to note, because it speaks to the hypocrisy of the Trump administration’s attacks on universities that it accuses of antisemitism. According to The New York Times, the Trump administration wants Gibson to regain his right to own guns. Because everyone needs guns. It’s the only human right Americans seem to agree on.

The justice department’s former “pardon attorney”, Elizabeth Oyer, said she was fired from the post in March after she refused to recommend that gun ownership rights be restored for Gibson, despite pressure to do so from her superiors.

She said in an interview with The New York Times after her firing that a department official had tried to convince her to change her mind because Gibson “has a personal relationship with President Trump”.

One of the other myths that US presidents use to oil their political machinations is the one that Pontius Pilate, urged on by the crowd who had turned out to see the crucifixions, wanted to pardon Jesus. But he was persuaded not to by Jewish leaders, who pressured him by emphasising how Jesus’ claim to be the king of the Jews was a political threat to Rome. Instead of releasing Jesus, the crowd chose to free a notorious prisoner called Barabbas.

Which brings us rather neatly back to Gibson. If Trump had been in charge at the crucifixion, he too would have based his decision on political expediency and what was best for him.

As The Times of Israel details, in January Trump appointed Gibson, “along with fellow conservative celebrities Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone, to the newly created role of ‘special ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California’”.

In his Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “They will serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK — BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE! These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest. It will again be, like The United States of America itself, The Golden Age of Hollywood!”

It’s probably worth reminding ourselves of some of the reasons ambassador Gibson has been accused of antisemitism. One relates to an incident in July 2006, related by The Times of Israel, in which a police officer, James Mee, pulled Gibson over on the Pacific Coast Highway. “After informing Gibson, who is drunk, that he will be detained, the actor says, apropos of nothing, ‘F***ing Jews … the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,’ before asking Mee, ‘Are you a Jew?’ (Mee is.)”

According to The Guardian, Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter on a cancelled Gibson movie project called The Maccabees, wrote in a letter to Gibson at the time the project was scrapped: “You said that the Torah made mention of the sacrifice of Christian babies and infants. When I told you that you were confusing the Torah with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion [a fake text about a Jewish conspiracy for global domination] ... you insisted, ‘It’s in the Torah — it’s in there!’ (It isn’t).”

As an aside, Jonathan Sarna, a professor of US Jewish history at Brandeis University, has pointed out that some of the now-pardoned January 6 rioters “hoped to trigger what is known as the ‘Great Revolution’, based on a fictionalised account of a government takeover and race war, that, in its most extreme form, would exterminate Jews”.

I’m revisiting the Gibson story for a reason. The fact that Trump has made an antisemite a “special ambassador” is not going to surprise anyone, but it does throw into sharp relief his attacks on US universities.

Trump has threatened to withhold or freeze billions in federal funding from universities that he considers to be promoting “woke” ideologies, supporting diversity, equity and inclusion, and failing to protect Jewish students. The antisemitism charges, Michael Roth, the Jewish president of Wesleyan University, told National Public Radio, are being used as a cloak to get universities to “express loyalty to the president”.

It’s an outright attack on academic freedom, and part and parcel of a larger attack on human rights. In Amnesty International’s annual report on the state of human rights, released in April, it warns that “the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency have ‘supercharged’ a global rollback of human rights, pushing the world towards an authoritarian era defined by impunity and unchecked corporate power”. According to The Guardian, Amnesty said: “The immediate ramifications of Trump’s second term had been the undermining of decades of progress and the emboldening of authoritarian leaders.”

Amnesty says that “growing inaction over the climate crisis, violent crackdowns on dissent and a mounting backlash against the rights of migrants, refugees, women, girls and LGBTQ+ people could be traced to the so-called Trump effect”.

It starts with pardoning a turkey to placate Big Chicken, and it ends up with pardoning all sorts of egregious attacks on human rights. OK, that’s a tenuous connection, but you can see where I’m going here. Not that we needed more evidence, but the hypocrisy at the core of Trump’s claims to be combating antisemitism doesn’t just apply to this specific example. It suffuses all his executive orders that claim to be righting wrongs.

One thing is sure. At the end of his term, like his predecessor Joe Biden did, he will pre-emptively pardon his cronies for any alleged crimes. Yes, it’s not just turkeys. A US president can pretty much pardon anybody for anything, and probably even, as Trump claims, pardon themselves.