At Pardoning Ceremony, Trump Informs Turkey of All He’s Accomplished

The Washington Post

17:18 JST, November 26, 2025

Imagine being Gobble.

You have a pretty nice life in Nahunta, North Carolina. You eat corn and soybeans, and spend time outdoors. You are lovingly raised by a man named Travis Pittman and his family.

And then you’re loaded into a crate and brought to Washington, and all of a sudden, a bunch of guys are pointing cameras and staring at you. You’re put on a table in front of even more guys with cameras, and a man with golden-white hair is talking, loudly, about something called “the radical left Democrats” and the “terrorist confinement center in El Salvador” and “the autopen.”

Not that you, being a turkey, know what any of that means. But still, it’s a lot.

“Over the last few months, we have spent a lot of time getting them used to people, lights and different sounds, so they’ll be ready for the cameras,” Pittman said of 52-pound Gobble and his alternate, the 50-pound Waddle, during a Monday media meet-and-greet.

And so Gobble was prepared for this moment, even if he didn’t know what he had been preparing for, or what the moment was.

The moment, of course, was Tuesday’s annual presidential turkey pardon at the White House. Gobble was here for clemency – from what offense, he did not know. (And frankly, nor did we.) Gobble blinked at the crowd, his white feathers a contrast to the brilliant-red wattle festooning his neck, looking a bit like the president’s red tie. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump spoke to the assembled humans of things beyond avian comprehension.

“I won’t tell you about murders,” Trump said.

He then proceeded to tell us about murders.

“We’re having murders, like, a lot of murders, on a weekly basis. We haven’t had a murder in six months,” the president continued, referring to crime in Washington since he deployed National Guard troops here. (The Washington Post has reported five homicides in D.C. so far in November.) He moved on to Chicago, calling the city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, a “low-IQ person” and the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, a “big fat slob.” (“I’d like to lose a few pounds, too, by the way,” the president later added.) Turkeys being fat, of course, is not an insult (we don’t think), and Trump assessed Gobble and his understudy to be among the biggest turkeys a president had ever pardoned.

“I’ve never seen a turkey that big before. Are they violent at all? Will they attack as I walk over?” Trump asked, adding that if they were violent, they would be shipped off to El Salvador. He joked that he would have named them “Chuck and Nancy” – presumably Schumer and Pelosi, his longtime Democratic foils – but, “I would never pardon those two people.”

Trump’s second term has, so far, been marked by both clemency and vengeance. He began the year by pardoning about 1,500 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Throughout 2025, he has pardoned – among others – attorney and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, baseball player Darryl Strawberry, reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, and cryptocurrency titan Changpeng Zhao. He also commuted the sentence of former congressman George Santos. Meanwhile, the president has sought charges against perceived rivals, including former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James – both of whom had their charges dismissed Monday, while Gobble and Waddle were settling into their rooms at the Willard hotel.

Trump has also previously claimed on Truth Social that his predecessor’s pardons of Jan. 6 committee members were “hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT” because he alleged they were signed by autopen. (Legal scholars have said there is no constitutional mechanism for overturning presidential pardons, regardless of how they were signed.)

On Tuesday, he said the same for President Joe Biden’s pardons of last year’s turkeys, Peach and Blossom.

“Last year’s turkey pardons are totally invalid,” Trump said. “As are the pardons of about every other person that was pardoned other than – where’s Hunter?”

Gobble hadn’t a clue.

“No, Hunter’s was good. That was the one pardon, Pam, that was good, right?” Trump went on, addressing Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was in the audience. “The rest of them are all invalid. I don’t know what the hell you’re going to do about that.”

The president then suggested that he had to redo the Biden pardons of Peach and Blossom, saying those turkeys “were on their way to be processed. In other words, to be killed. But I’ve stopped that journey, and I am officially pardoning them. And they will not be served for Thanksgiving dinner. We saved them in the nick of time.”

Actually, we’re told Peach and Blossom have been living a quiet life at Farmamerica, an educational farm in Waseca, Minnesota. “We’ve been honored to have them here all year,” Jessica Rollins, the nonprofit’s executive director, said in an interview Tuesday. Of Trump’s allusions to the Biden-pardoned turkeys’ near-demise, Rollins said: “That is his sense of humor.”

And what about Gobble and Waddle? They, too, are slated to return to their home state, where arrangements have been made for the pair to live out their lives in the care of North Carolina State University’s poultry science department. No more people with cameras. No more standing on a table while a human talks about having “ended eight wars in nine months” and how “we were a dead country one year ago – the king of Saudi Arabia said it to me.”

At the end of the ceremony, the president and first lady approached the turkey.

“You are hereby unconditionally pardoned,” the president told Gobble – who, in an inadvertently formal gesture, responded by stating his name.