Happy Thanksgiving! Time to prepare our annual list of things we should be grateful for. Here's five from me. Add your own.

News and views for thoughtful--and thankful--Floridians and other Americans

I have so many things to be thankful for today, this first Thanksgiving of Donald Trump’s second presidency.

It’s hard to know where to start. Being a glass-half-full kind of guy, everywhere I turn, I see all this good news.

So, here are five things I believe are worth expressing our gratitude for. Feel free to add your own to the list in the Comments section below.

Thank you, J.D. Vance

Because of former senator and now Vice President J.D. Vance’s heroic disclosure, a colossal culinary calamity has concluded. (And, yes, that’s a quadruple alliteration, but we’ll get back to alliterative phrases in a moment.)

You may recall that during the lead-up to the most recent presidential election, Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were reported to be eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs.

You know this not because the Lamestream Media wrote about it. Oh, no. They wouldn’t touch it with a fork. But J.D. Vance did.

On Sept. 9, 2024, he fearlessly posted on Twitter (currently known as X):

“Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

Then, Donald Trump amplified this terrifying news the next day:

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

These courageous announcements, led off by Vance, helped propel them to victory in that election and—miracle of miracles—ended this hideous nightmare. Since Trump and Vance took office, you will note there have been no further reports of these atrocities.

Of course, the only people reporting them in the first place were Vance and Trump, but let’s not be ungenerous.

Thank you—or mesi—as we say in Haitian Creole.

This Thanksgiving, the people of Springfield will be eating turkey instead of Fido and Fluffy.

Just like they always did.

Thank you, Marjorie Taylor Greene

Speaking of fearless politicians who have dared to speak the unspeakable, we now give thanks to Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and her courageous notification to the American people that a string of forest fires plaguing western states was caused by Jewish space lasers.

In fairness, her now-deleted social media post never actually used the term “Jewish space lasers.” What she said was this:

“If they are beaming the sun’s energy back to Earth, I’m sure they wouldn’t ever miss a transmitter receiving station, right??!! What would that look like anyway? A laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth I guess. Could that cause a fire? Hmmm, I don’t know”.

She then suggested it might be a plot sponsored by the Rothschild banking family, a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Jewish financiers + orbital lasers = Jewish space lasers.

But here’s the good news for which we are grateful. NASA “has made no official statement” about Jewish space lasers. Which means they aren’t up there anymore. Looks like MTG scared them off.

Her mission accomplished, MTG is now retiring from Congress and returning to Georgia with plans to start a security business to be called “Gazpacho Police.”

Thank you very much, Marjorie, or as we say in Hebrew, Toda Raba.

Thank you, James Uthmeier

We love alliterations. They are simple literary tricks we learned about in high school, but in case that’s been a while, they are the use of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent words.

So, for instance, at the beginning of this newsletter I noted that a “colossal culinary calamity has concluded.”

Alliterations have always been popular (mainly because they are easy), but Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has lifted them to a new literary level.

He’s the guy who introduced us to the phrase Alligator Alcatraz. Shortly thereafter, we had Deportation Depot, then the Panhandle Pokey — all concentration camps to hold victims of I.C.E. raids around the state.

Which spawned a barrage of internet memes and merchandise sold by the Republican Party. After all, if you can’t make a buck off other humans’ suffering, what’s the point of capitalism?

So, thank you, Uthmeier

Thank you, Mike Johnson

A special tip of the hat to the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives for his thoughtfulness towards his colleagues this year.

You may not realize this, but members of Congress spend an average of 144 working days a year in that crime-ridden hellhole known as Washington, D.C. Sure, that’s even fewer than the number of days teachers work, but the job is taxing, and they are only paid a paltry $174,000 a year.

Okay, again, that’s more than teachers make, but consider how brutal the job is:

Every day, your typical congressperson must start their Tuesday-through-Thursday work week, spending hours and hours on the phone dialing for dollars. In fact, grubbing for money is mostly what the job is about. They need to do this so they can be re-elected and come to Washington again and spend their three-day work weeks continuing to dial for dollars.

It’s a vicious cycle.

So, you can imagine how happy Republicans in Congress were when Johnson, also a Republican, told them they could take a seven-week taxpayer-paid vacation recently while members of his party shut down the federal government.

What a great guy.

On behalf of all of the very rested members of the House, let’s say a hearty thank you to Johnson the Generous.

Thank you, Ron DeSantis

It’s so hard to narrow this Thanksgiving list to five honorees, but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out a special guy, Gov. Ron DeSantis.

One of the governor’s jobs is to appoint members to various boards and commissions around the state.

One of those boards runs Miami Dade College, the largest community college in the nation. As a two-term governor, DeSantis has had numerous opportunities to appoint members to that board.

How many? All of them.

So, it was hardly a surprise when, recently, the board asked “how high” when the governor told them to jump.

He wanted the college to give up about three acres in downtown Miami so he could, in turn, hand it over to members of Donald Trump’s family running his presidential library foundation.

The board met. Did exactly that and — Poof! — there went millions of taxpayers’ dollars.

Except there was a small problem. The board cheated. They didn’t tell anyone what they were going to do. Which could be construed as a violation of state law, as if that were important.

So now the whole transaction is tied up in court.

But, still, wasn’t that nice of DeSantis to give his pal, Trump, all that real estate on our behalf?

Just one more thing to be thankful for—politicians who know how to give.

To each other.

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Thank you for reading the Tropic Press newsletter. You also have access to the Tropic Press website for additional and previous posts, an archive of posts from our advice columnist, Miss Mingo, occasional guest commentaries, and information about The Strange Files series of mysterious adventures and other books.

J.C. Bruce, journalist and author, is the founder of Tropic Press. He holds dual citizenship in the United States of America and his native Florida. Forward this email to your friends. They will love you for it.

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