CNN seems to be staffed almost exclusively with prolific grandstanders and pontificators of a very high caliber. One of their loudest, angriest, and overly dramatic orators is Prime Time host Chris Cuomo. During Tuesday’s edition of the show, he ended the first hour of his program by telling the story of how Thanksgiving got reinvented during times of great hardship and strife in America. According to him, “Thanksgiving is coming, and not a moment too soon” because we’re experiencing one of those times.

“This national day to give thanks was actually designed for times just like those we are living. I'll prove it,” he began his long-winded rant.

Starting with President Trump, Cuomo talked about how Thanksgiving shouldn’t revolve around Trump and was a holiday bigger than one person. “In fact, the designers of the day would insist on that,” he declared. “Yes, it was actually done as an offset, a reminder of gratitude during the worst of times. In fact, especially then.”

You read that right, we’re living during one of America’s worse times. According to Cuomo, the Trump-era was right up there with the struggle of Pilgrims, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and Pearl Harbor. He said as much when he as he went along.

Cuomo looked to the founding of our nation and discovered a time that mirrored our own (click “expand” to read):

President Washington started by calling for a day of public Thanksgiving and praise not to commemorate the pilgrims but to help people then keep perspective in the midst of a particularly tough time of lean crops and illness. When he looked around him and surveyed the distress, he said, “you know what? As bad as it is, we have to give thanks. Look where we are. Look what we escaped. Look how good things still can be.” The pilgrims were a touchstone. They were a metaphor for perseverance but the message was about those early Americans, seeing the promise of what they were building through their pain. The darker moments of deprivation. To give them some perspective, some promise.

As a reminder, this rant was being delivered under the premise that we’re living during a truly awful and trying period in American history.

“In the military of the Civil War, 1863 during the birth of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln called for a day of thanks during one of the ugliest periods of the Civil War,” Cuomo continued. “He decided to remedy division by ignoring it in favor of the greater goals and common aspirations of all those fighting. He called them all Americans. He barely referred to unionists and rebels.”

He then praised President FDR for reinventing Thanksgiving by signing it into law following Pearl Harbor. “Once again, in a time of national crisis, the worst attack on domestic soil at the time, reeling from the Great Depression, FDR saw the coming of Thanksgiving, a point of national resolve, all of us in it together. The truth greater than the vagaries of the time, even Pearl Harbor,” Cuomo opined.

Cuomo apparently saw himself as one of those great men because he tried to quell the fears of CNN viewers by preaching about how we should celebrate the coming holiday:

The reality that we have much to be thankful for as Americans as one of those interconnected and interdependent in a place and during a time where the best is still yet to come. That's the story of Thanksgiving, and it comes again this year just like it does every year, and it is exactly the right time with what we're dealing with.

“I'm going to include you,” Cuomo announced as though we should all be grateful. “Trolls too because we are all in this together. Thanksgiving is designed and forged from hard fates to remind us of exactly that. The best is still yet to come.”

Gag.

The transcript is below, click "expand" to read: