President Donald Trump has made a surprise visit to Afghanistan to address U.S. troops on Thanksgiving Thursday.
The
president arrived at Bagram Air Field around 8:30 p.m. local time and
spent roughly two-and-a-half hours in the war-torn country. The media
was under “strict instructions” to keep the visit under wraps for
security reasons, CBS News reports.
No surprise there. The military loves the guy, and he's good to veterans as well. This is a president that cares about the troops, unlike his lawless predecessor!
Of course, the idiot MSM can't even get this right:
President Donald Trump mocked Newsweek after
they reported Thursday he spent Thanksgiving golfing and tweeting. In
fact, the president was secretly traveling to Afghanistan to visit
deployed American troops.
“I thought Newsweek was out of
business?” Trump wrote on Twitter, sharing a screenshot of the article
and photos of him with the troops in Afghanistan posted by his son
Donald Trump Jr.
Nice to see him holding them accountable!
While they were compiling their lies for their Fake News stories, he was busy acknowledging the history of the day and reasons to be thankful:
President Donald Trump recalled the spirit of unity and gratitude in his Thanksgiving proclamation for 2019.
Trump
noted the pilgrims spent their first Thanksgiving seated in unity with
the Wampanoag Tribe after they helped them survive in the New World.
“That first Thanksgiving provided an enduring symbol of gratitude
that is uniquely sewn into the fabric of our American spirit,” Trump wrote.
The president also recalled America’s first president, George
Washington declared a National Day of Thanksgiving after the
Revolutionary War and the new Constitution and President Abraham Lincoln
proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving after the battle of Gettysburg.
First Lady Melania Trump took to Twitter on
Thursday to wish Americans a “blessed Thanksgiving” and thank those in
the military serving overseas.
“May you all have a blessed
Thanksgiving! Enjoy time with your family and friends. To those in our
military who are serving overseas, you are in our thoughts and prayers –
our nation is thankful for all you do!”
Classy lady, and certainly a patriotic American who is proud of her country!
People in Hong Kong appreciate our president as well, for all he's done for them:
Thousands of demonstrators in Hong Kong staged a “Thanksgiving” rally on Thursday evening in response to President Donald Trump signing two bills in support of the city’s pro-democracy movement.
Demonstrators
took to the streets shortly after the president signed the legislation.
Some draped themselves in U.S. flags and expressed gratitude for the
administration’s support.
“The rationale for us having this rally is to show our gratitude and
thank the U.S Congress and also President Trump for passing the bill,”
student Sunny Cheung, 23, told
Reuters. “We are really grateful about that and we really appreciate
the effort made by Americans who support Hong Kong, who stand with Hong
Kong, who do not choose to side with Beijing.”
“I was confident Donald Trump would sign the law because we are
fighting for universal freedom. Everyone globally should support that,”
another young woman told
the news outlet. “But we do want to give thanks to those around the
globe that support us, a small city like Hong Kong, we thank them for
their attention.”
Pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong held up
posters featuring U.S. President Donald Trump depicted as “Rocky Balboa”
at a special rally on Thanksgiving Day to thank the president for
signing legislation supporting their cause.
On Wednesday, Trump
tweeted a humorous image of his face superimposed on Sylvester
Stallone’s body, circa 1976, in the role of prizefighter Rocky Balboa.
Left-wing Hollywood personalities were outraged, and mainstream media fact-checkers tittered in disapproval, but most people took the tweet as a joke.
Except in Hong Kong. There, protesters appear to have taken the image
seriously, as a depiction of American resolve against China.
On Wednesday, President Trump signed
two relevant bills into law. One, the Hong Kong Human Rights and
Democracy Act, “mandates sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials
who carry out human rights abuses and requires an annual review of the
favorable trade status that Washington grants Hong Kong,” the Associated
Press reported. The other bill prohibits the export to Hong Kong of
non-lethal arms used by police to suppress protests.
It was not clear at first whether the president would sign the bills,
though they had overwhelming support in Congress. Trump is in the midst
of delicate trade talks with China, and while he has sometimes used the
Hong Kong issue to gain leverage, he has also appealed to China by
supporting talks instead of confrontation. In a statement Wednesday, he
said: “I signed these bills out of respect for President Xi, China, and
the people of Hong Kong.”
You've gotta love this! He's so adept at trolling the Left, and people love him for it!
Then, there is a nice flashback article for you, and some history:
Former President Ronald Reagan delivered a
memorable Thanksgiving address in 1985, with his words continuing to
ring true 34 years later.
The 40th president delivered brief
remarks on the cherished holiday, urging Americans to thank God for the
liberty they enjoy in the United States.
“You know, the Statue of Liberty and this wonderful holiday
called Thanksgiving go together naturally because although as Americans
we have many things for which to be thankful, none is more important
than our liberty,” he said, painting a stark contrast between the
freedoms Americans enjoyed and the oppression that remains a reality for
so many across the globe:
Fundamental American values manifested in the
story of Thanksgiving centuries before the Declaration of Independence
and Constitution, explained Wilfred McClay, author of Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story and professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, in a Tuesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Mansour invited McClay’s assessment of criticisms of the November holiday among left-wing teachers calling for students to “unlearn” a “feel-good” Thanksgiving “myth.” McClay said of leftist contempt for
Thanksgiving, “I think it’s a reflection of what — for some people — is
the obsession with the politicization of all aspects of life, and
everything has to be brought into conformity with some kind of
ideological worldview.”
McClay continued, “It’s almost like a kind of revolutionary religion,
like in the French Revolution, the way they abolished the calendar, and
tried to reinvent civilization from the bottom up. It’s the kind of
mentality [against] something that really … is one of most admirable
holidays imaginable. Of course, we aren’t the only ones that have
Thanksgiving in the world, but it is integral to our essential
practises, and it’s an expression of gratitude.”
“It has religious roots,” said McClay of the history of Thanksgiving.
“In the 1620s — there’s some debate over when the first Thanksgiving
was, whether it was in Virginia or whether it was in Plymouth, but it’s
in the 17th century — it had religious overtones, particularly with the
Pilgrims in 1621.” McClay added, “It is an amazing
story. Of course they had come in pursuit of freedom to practise their
religion and raise their children as they saw fit. They had come from
the Netherlands, where religious liberty was available to them, but it
was a hard place to live for various reasons, and particularly for their
children, to have them grow up not speaking English and all of that, so
they got on the Mayflower and came on over.” “It was a terrible, brutal first
winter,” stated McClay. “They suffered from disease and exposure, and
about half of them died. Many of them never came off the ship because
they saw the landing as so dangerous, but they did have favorable
contacts with some of the native tribes, the Patuxet Tribe [and]
Squanto, and he taught them how to cultivate corn, what plants to eat
and what plants not to eat.” “[Squanto] was an intermediary,”
explained McClay. “He helped [the Pilgrims] form relationships with the
Wampanoag Tribe. … They had this celebratory feast in November 1621 to
celebrate a successful harvest of corn that Squanto had helped show them
[how] to cultivate. So that’s seen as the historical origin of it, and
it was, by all accounts, by everything we know about it, and we don’t
know a lot.” McClay remarked, “Puritans were great
about keeping journals and diaries. They saw success or failure as
evidence of the degree to which they were being faithful to God. …
That’s what their settlement was all about. They saw this as a mission,
this errand into the wilderness.” “Ten years later, John Winthrop, who
led the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which became Boston — he gave this
magnificent speech … where the phrase ‘city on a hill’ comes from —
makes it very clear this was a religious enterprise, so they’re grateful
to God [for] the success in finally getting through — or at least
having the materials to get through — the coming winter,” added McClay. Fundamental American values were being developed by the early colonists, explained McClay. “What they did was enact social
compact theory that had been sort of kicked around in Europe —
especially in Britain — for awhile,” McClay noted. “They created a body
politic out of the consent of those who were aboard the ship, and they
had the foresight to realize they should [and] could do that … two
centuries before the Declaration of Independence, the idea that
government is based on the consent of the governed, which of course is
one of the fundamental American ideas. So all of this is prefigured by
the Mayflower Compact.” McClay said, “There’s a kind of
audacity about these [first colonists] that we miss, I think, in the
historical accounts. Their journeys were dangerous. The habitats into
which they were coming were brutal, and they lost many lives, and yet
they had this sense that …. they were on a mission of God, ‘The eyes of
all people are upon us.’ … They were so deeply committed to the vision
of what they were doing, and that was the germ of what became,
ultimately, a great nation.”
The Puritans sought religious restoration via their settlement enterprise, explained McClay.
“[The Puritans] wanted to just have a faithful remnant of a church
that they thought had become corrupt in England, and in Europe, in
general,” McClay shared. “What they really wanted to do was recreate
what [William Bradford] called, ‘the primitive church,’ and that doesn’t
mean people running around with spears and that sort of thing. It meant
a church that resembled the church of the time of the apostles and
Jesus and immediately after Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, the
early time of the church, when it was simpler, when you didn’t have a
lot of pomp and ceremony and popes and bishops running around in fancy
robes and the accumulation of wealth and worldly power.” McClay added, “It’s proper, I think,
that we really trace Thanksgiving more to the Puritans, to a kind of
reverent Thanksgiving.” “[Left-wing criticism of
Thanksgiving] doesn’t touch the validity of the holiday for us, because
we don’t necessarily ground what we value of Thanksgiving in that
historical episode. It’s not like the founding is, where it really
matters what the language of the [Declaration of Independence] and
Constitution was, and we want to try to stay as close as we can to the
original intent of those documents. We don’t have that same kind of
relationship to the first Thanksgiving, so I think it’s kind of a phony
charge, what it does reflect to me is this pervasive politicization of
American life, particularly from a left, radical, critical perspective.” McClay described Thanksgiving as an “aspirational” holiday. “A myth, properly understood, is not a
falsehood,” McClay said. “We say that we believe all men are created
equal. In some literal way, of course that’s not true, so what do we
mean? Do we mean all men are created equal in the eyes of God? Maybe,
although secular people might object to that formulation, but we
certainly mean we have a kind of aspiration towards recognition of — in
some ultimate way that’s very hard to define — the equal worth of all
individual people. That’s really, I think, fundamentally religious. It’ s
hard to imagine that existing out of a Juedo-Christian understanding of human beings.” McClay went on, “We have this day
because we aspire to reconciliation to one another and a recognition of
just how profoundly indebted we are to those who came before us, to our
parents, to our surrounding society, to our neighbors and friends, that
there’s so much that we take for granted every single day.” “How are you going to go through
life?” asked McClay. “How are you going to go through the world? Are you
going to go through it thinking that everything is your due and
everything you don’t get [means] you’re being cheated by the world? Or
do you think, ‘Why do I have something rather than nothing? Isn’t that
great?'” McClay continued, “The Christian view
— I’m sweeping widely, here — is that we don’t really deserve anything.
Our sinful nature is that we don’t really have anything coming to us,
that it’s God’s graciousness that is the source of all these good things
that we really don’t deserve.” “It is a time in which we recognize
our own insufficiencies, that we are not islands unto ourselves and that
we depend on others, and that there are so many people in our lives to
whom we owe profound gratitude, and just the bounty of existence,”
determined McClay. “These are all reasons for gratitude.”
McClay contrasted gratitude and ingratitude. “Gratitude is the proper disposition
of a healthy human soul, and it’s the proper disposition of a good
citizen in a democratic society,” assessed McClay. “If we lose those
things and we become, sort of, brats — and I’m not meaning to say all
the radical critiques of American society are bratty, most of them are,
but not all of them — brattiness is a kind of ingratitude and a feeling
that, ‘I deserve it all and whatever I don’t get is a form of
expropriation.’ It’s the seed of
other good things, other forms of mutual appreciation and reconciliation
that can occur, and to take that away atomizes people.it leaves people
without a means to reach out to one another.”
Left-wing critiques of Thanksgiving are generally a part of a broader
political campaign to undermine America’s founding, concluded McClay.
That one, you have in full, because it's a great message, and one a lot of people don't hear these days.
Hope you all had a great holiday, with people you love!
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