Overview
- At a Rose Garden event, President Donald Trump granted ceremonial pardons to two turkeys named Gobble and Waddle as part of the Thanksgiving tradition.
- Gobble and Waddle traveled from North Carolina and stayed at Washington’s Willard InterContinental Hotel before the ceremony, and they are slated to retire to NC State’s Prestage Department of Poultry Science.
- During the event, Trump claimed Joe Biden used an autopen for the 2024 turkey pardons and called them invalid, a charge reported in coverage without documentary evidence in these articles.
- The modern turkey pardon became a standing annual White House event under President George H.W. Bush in 1989, building on decades of National Turkey Federation presentations dating to the 1940s.
- Earlier precedents include John F. Kennedy sparing a turkey in 1963 and Ronald Reagan invoking the word “pardon” in 1987, examples often cited in accounts of the tradition’s evolution.