We are all recovering – Americans from coast to coast and myself – from the gargantuan meal that marks Thanksgiving year after year. Collectively, we all share a bit of remorse for subjecting our stomachs to so much excess. Remorse which intertwines this year with the joys and disillusionments of having postponed Donald Trump to the presidency.
Unless you have fully experienced Thanksgiving somewhere in the United States, I don’t think you understand the unique place this holiday occupies in American culture. Just like our Thanksgiving, the idea is to celebrate the harvests and other blessings of the past year.
Americans – even those of recent immigration – surprisingly indulge in distant memories of a harvest feast shared by the English settlers of Plymouth and the Wampanoag people in 1621.
Without religious reference or great patriotic outbursts, Thanksgiving, in a society that values individualism, places the emphasis, for a short day, on gratitude, family and community. Everyone is invited to contemplate and enjoy the blessings of the year.
A trying year
Americans arrived exhausted this year at Thanksgiving. Both the winners and the losers of the presidential election have gone through all the emotions and we are still very far from a sincere desire for reconciliation.
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, there are still some blessings to celebrate. Starting with the positive consequences of Donald Trump’s victory – yes, there is at least one – and, it’s painful to talk about it like this, the advantage of Joe Biden being the big loser of the year .
We must know how to appreciate, once again in the spirit of Thanksgiving, the fact that the unambiguous success of Donald Trump will calm the ardor of the most rebellious among our neighbors to the South. Small consolation, I admit, but republican institutions and American democracy would have suffered, as it is difficult to imagine, from a new January 6, 2021 type protest.
Thank you Joe!
There is a tribute to be paid to Joe Biden who ultimately lost everything this year. The Democratic leadership has roughly withdrew the party’s nomination, after having for a long time turned a blind eye to its undeniable aging. Kamala Harris paid dearly for her loyalty to him: in itself, her electoral defeat is a second rejection of Joe Biden.
As Donald Trump’s policies portend the doom of the Biden administration’s grand plans, there may not be much left of this presidency in a few years.
However, Americans will be able to count on a peaceful and orderly transfer of power. A lifetime of playing the democratic game — from the Senate to the presidency to the vice presidency — has prepared Joe Biden to wisely facilitate a transition to an administration toward which he has nothing but distrust and loathing.
And he will leave his successor with a country back on track. No one wants to talk about it anymore, but after Trump’s first presidency and in the final months of the pandemic, the entire United States was demanding a little calm and more economic vigor.
This is what its major investment programs will have accomplished at the cost of course a surge in inflation, but even there, the measures taken by the FED, the central bank, ended up reducing this rate to a reasonable level. .
Donald Trump’s second presidency will start on a good footing. Once again, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, he should say thank you to his predecessor. As you know, however, that won’t happen.
