OK, we’re starting to lose track; we’ve had guides on how to talk about President Trump and politics around the Thanksgiving table from the ACLU, a pro-abortion group, MoveOn, and The Atlantic — all left-leaning, of course. For some reason, conservatives don’t seem to see Thanksgiving as a compulsory gathering for political debate. It’s just like when the media makes an error — it’s always in one direction, and when Thanksgiving rolls around, it’s always the liberals telling us how to steer the conversation.

Now, at last, the Washington Post has weighed in, asking if we have yet learned to talk politics on this, the “fourth Thanksgiving of the Trump era.”

These are really getting tedious, but here we go:

Set aside, for a moment, its dark and dubious origins; Thanksgiving is supposed to be sacrosanct. We volunteer on Thanksgiving. We run 5K races for charity on Thanksgiving. We admire enormous parading balloons, for some reason, on Thanksgiving. Above all, we are thankful for one another on Thanksgiving.

Except when we’re not. Politics has always been there, the enormous elephant balloon in the room, threatening to disturb the culturally prescribed peace and fellowship by popping all of a sudden.

For plenty of families, Trump’s election stretched the skin of that balloon even tighter than usual. M. Keith Chen, a professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles, calls this “The Thanksgiving Effect.” After he endured a contentious family holiday in 2016, Chen says, he and Ryne Rohla, a doctoral student at Washington State University, decided to use the holiday “as a lens to try and understand the degree to which political polarization was degrading close family ties.”

Oh man, we have to set aside Thanksgiving’s “dark and dubious origins”? That’s awfully colonialist of the Washington Post.

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Tags: Donald TrumppoliticsThanksgivingWashington Post