Donald Trump, as President of the United States, sent the American people a Thanksgiving night message in which he spread hatred against immigrants. He incited hostility with blatant lies about immigrants. This is especially absurd because Thanksgiving is about immigration — the roots of America and the American nation — about helping newcomers, and about gratitude.
After a post like this, one could legitimately call for his resignation. Much stronger public attention should be drawn to this message and to the self-revealing claims it contains. It attacks the origins, roots, values, culture, and fundamental identity of the American people. Anyone who calls themselves a patriot should reject this anti-American hate speech.
This message exposes, more clearly than anything, that America has a president who denies the nation’s past, insults and vilifies American values, and is unfit for the office he holds. If anything is un-American, it is hatred toward immigrants — especially on Thanksgiving Day, which makes this a desecration of the holiday itself.
Trump’s message is the very opposite of what Thanksgiving stands for. Thanksgiving, second only to Christmas, is America’s greatest family holiday — a reminder that every American is a descendant of immigrants. America and its people would not exist had immigration not taken place, and had Indigenous peoples not helped and saved those first settlers.
Since then, Thanksgiving has served to remind every American of this moral command: that the descendants of immigrants must show the same openness and generosity. The past obliges this nation. The descendants of immigrants can repay what their ancestors received from Native Americans by helping today’s immigrants.
Yet the current president — the man using the slogan “Make America Great Again” — incites hatred against immigrants even on Thanksgiving Day. This is the exact opposite of what a “great America” means. Trump’s own family are immigrants. He himself would not be in America had his ancestors not come here. To attack immigrants as President on Thanksgiving is perverse.
We don’t wish to repeat the cliché that America owes everything to immigrants. Instead, we point out that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is racial hatred, and that he spread lies about immigrants even on Thanksgiving night. On his ironically named social-media platform Truth Social, he posted crude falsehoods.
Trump claimed that by admitting immigrants, Americans had allowed their country to be “divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at.” It was not immigrants who divided America — it was racist extremists. It was not immigrants who looted America — it was the fraudsters who were actually convicted of doing so.
This language comes straight from the filthiest pages of the darkest far-right pulp fiction.
Trump claimed that “an immigrant with a green card earning $30,000 a year receives roughly $50,000 a year in benefits for their family.” This is one of the biggest lies ever told. America is not known for having a generous social safety net. No one in America receives $50,000 a year in benefits — not in cash, not as tax credits, not even in health-insurance subsidies.
Typical social benefits amount to a few hundred dollars a month — barely enough to survive. The Affordable Care Act covers part of a family’s health-insurance costs, but even for a family of four this does not reach $20,000 a year. It merely allows people to see a doctor when they are sick — and even then, there are deductibles. A $50,000 subsidy is pure incitement.
And the majority of immigrants are NOT even eligible for the most important federal benefits for their first five years in the country.
The ACA subsidy isn’t “for immigrants” — it’s for anyone with low income. Trump criminalizes immigrants and labels all immigrants as criminals. He spreads lies such as the claim that hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees have “taken over the once great state of Minnesota.” This is an absurd falsehood.
So is the claim that “Somali gangs roam the streets looking for prey, while our wonderful people lock themselves in their homes hoping to be left alone.” What? According to Trump, Somali gangs control American streets, and Americans live barricaded in their homes, afraid to step outside?
Does anyone seriously believe this deranged lie? This is the rhetoric of an unhinged man. It is fortunate he did not add — as he did earlier in the campaign — that immigrants eat Americans’ pets, their dogs and cats. Americans elected him despite these claims. That alone demands national self-reflection.
America must face reality when the spirit of hatred, incitement, and division pours out of the White House even on Thanksgiving night. This is the opposite of everything America stands for. The nation must ask how such a person could occupy the White House, how a man who has escaped accountability for everything could come to power.
No immigrant has caused a fraction of the damage to America — economically, morally, or politically — that Donald Trump has. The country must be protected from him, not from those who, like the early settlers, carry forward America’s story. Those who, like their ancestors, could truly make America great. Trump is not among them.
Trump is not merely lying — he is undermining and falsifying the very foundations of American identity.
Thanksgiving is about responding to vulnerability with humanity. That is America. Trump’s administration is about cruelty — all of it wrapped in the language of Christianity. As Americans look ahead to Christmas, to the holy family sheltered by humble shepherds, and to the birth of the Messiah, one must wonder: what kind of anti-Christ message awaits on Christmas Eve?
