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Trump Participates in a Thanksgiving Call with Service Members, Nov. 27, 2025

November 27, 2025 · The White House · 0:50:53

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump spoke by video with members of the U.S. military from Palm Beach, Florida, on Thanksgiving evening, November 27, 2025. He opened with news that had arrived moments before: “I heard that Sarah Beckstrom of West Virginia, one of the guardsmen that we’re talking about… She’s just passed away. She’s no longer with us.” He said the other wounded guardsman was “fighting for his life,” and that DHS had confirmed the suspect was an Afghan national flown in by the previous administration.

He then worked through six units deployed across the hemisphere, representing every branch, as the White House presented them: the Army’s 101st Airborne Division leading the joint task force at the southern border — “we now have the most secure border in American history,” he said, crediting nine months in which “nobody came in,” as he stated it — the Navy’s Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group in the Caribbean with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit embarked, and the remaining services in turn. He cited “over a trillion dollars this year on our military,” as he put it.

The call closed with questions from reporters traveling with him, on Afghans and asylum, on Somalia and Minnesota, and on what he was most thankful for: “The fact that America’s great again. We made America great again.”

Why it matters

The Thanksgiving call is an annual ritual; this one became the moment the nation learned from its President that Specialist Beckstrom had died, delivered live to the deployed force she belonged to. This chronicle files it on the Foreign Policy & Defense hub as both a holiday observance and a war-room record.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Participates in a Call with Service Members,” Palm Beach, FL, November 27, 2025 (official upload, embedded above; published November 28, 2025). Remarks as delivered on the call.