No Morning Shots tomorrow or Friday—we hope you all get to enjoy Thanksgiving with family and friends. And for those of you who will be rubbing elbows with MAGA folks in your lives, keep on your best behavior, both because family’s more important and because you wouldn’t want to get in the way of anybody’s support for Trump collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Happy Wednesday, and gobble gobble.

George Washington’s Thanksgiving

by William Kristol

As we celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow, we’ll think back to the story of the peaceful encounter in 1621 of the Pilgrim settlers and members of the Wampanoag tribe. But I trust that it won’t dampen anyone’s enjoyment of the holiday if I note that this now familiar origin story of Thanksgiving became central to our commemoration only in the mid-nineteenth century.

The idea of a day of thanksgiving preceded the popularization of that particular story of the harvest feast. One sees that by taking a look at President George Washington’s first Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1789. There is nothing there about the Mayflower or the Pilgrims or a feast. It’s all about giving thanks for the new nation and the free government the people of the United States had recently established.

As Washington explains, the first Congress had asked him “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” That day was “to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts” that the Almighty had afforded Americans “an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”

And so Washington’s proclamation expresses our gratitude both for the success of our revolutionary struggle, and for the subsequent

peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted—for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

Washington then calls on the American people to ask the Almighty to continue to “render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed.”

In other words: Washington’s Thanksgiving was an occasion to give thanks for our new nation and for our form of government that safeguards civil and religious liberty with wise, just, and constitutional laws.

On many occasions and in many areas we have fallen short of the standard Washington sets forth. We haven’t always safeguarded civil liberty and enacted wise and just laws. Our national history has been marked by authoritarian episodes and unjust features.

But it is one thing to fall short of high goals; it is another to disdain striving for them, or even to scorn or despise them. We now have a presidential administration that is actively hostile to civil liberties, to the rule of law, to the fundamentals of free government. The authoritarian temptation isn’t an unfortunate part of this administration’s behavior, as it has been of other administrations. Authoritarianism is at the heart of its agenda. It defines it.

So this Thanksgiving, there is real cause for alarm. But after 250 years, we also have the examples of so many Americans, across so many generations, who have succeeded in the fight to preserve liberty and increase freedom. That history isn’t some kind of nice holiday story that we recall dimly through the mists of time. It’s real. It can reassure and educate and inspire us. It’s something from which to derive hope and for which to give thanks.

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Who’s Driving This Car?

by Cathy Young

The 28-point “Trump peace plan” for Ukraine—likely parroted, as an explosive Bloomberg report seems to confirm, from a Russian paper slipped to Trump envoy Steve Witkoff by Vladimir Putin’s emissary Kirill Dmitriev—is now an ex-parrot. After talks in Geneva, the United States and Ukraine have agreed on a 19-point plan not only pared down but substantially revised from the first version—which Trump says was not really a plan but just “a concept” anyway. (Where have we