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Food

Trump Says His Mother 'Gestated' Her Own Thanksgiving Turkey

Uh... what?
Photo: Bloomberg / Contributor via Getty Images

According to the Journal of Human Reproduction, the median gestational length for a human female is just over 38 weeks, give or take 37 days. According to Donald Trump, his mom could fully gestate in eight hours—at least when she gestated a Thanksgiving turkey.

Trump unwittingly referenced his late mother’s uterus (and her unconventional cooking methods) during an appearance in Charleston, West Virginia on Tuesday night. The President was presumably there to speak on behalf of Republican Senate candidate Patrick Morrisey, but he spent his time behind the podium pinballing from topic to topic to topic.

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After covering the NFL, Maxine Waters, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, fake news, “how many Chevrolets there are in the middle of Berlin,” Supreme Court nominee Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Space Force, the Paris Accord, and why his apartment is better and more beautiful than the apartments of other wealthy white men, he suddenly mentioned his mother’s ineffective (and frankly, unsanitary) method of cooking a turkey.

Because his brain is like an unsolvable image CAPTCHA, he veered from the challenge of making trade deals with China to his family’s Thanksgiving traditions. “You know what bothers me? I have people coming to me, some people in Congress ‘Sir, can you get this deal done immediately?' I said ‘It doesn’t work that way, I don’t want to go too fast, the deal’s not going to be any good if we do that,’” he began.

“It’s gotta gestate. The word ‘gestate.' Like when you are cooking a chicken. Time, time… turkey for Thanksgiving. My mother would say eight hours. I said ‘Eight hours?’ She made the greatest turkey I ever had.”

We have a lot of questions about those statements, starting with what he thinks ‘gestate’ means, and why it took his mother eight hours to roast that Thanksgiving bird. According to Butterball, the cooking time for turkeys can range from as little as two hours for an unstuffed six-to-seven-pound bird to more than six hours for a fully stuffed 24–30 pounder. So either Mary Anne Trump prepared, like, 40 pounds of poultry, or she told her family it would take eight hours so she could just sit alone in the kitchen, watching wisps of cigarette smoke drift toward the ceiling and wondering what her life had become. Or maybe her son just has a poor grasp of biology.

For what it’s worth, even turkeys don’t really gestate turkeys; instead, a hen lays eggs that she’ll incubate for between 26-28 days before they hatch. We hope Trump will update his next speech accordingly.