August 26, 2020

No, Donald Trump Has Not “Stood By” the Troops

“They try to cancel them.”

Trump

Michael Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

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Night three of the Republican National Convention is all about heroes, particularly—in the words of Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn—the “kind Democrats don’t recognize…the heroes of our law enforcement and armed services.”

“Leftists try to turn them into villains,” Blackburn complained. “They want to cancel them.”

It’s outrageous, if not particularly surprising, that Blackburn would caricature the nationwide movement against police brutality as nothing more than “cancel culture” run amok. It’s more outrageous still that she would do so just days after the gruesome police shooting of Jacob Blake.

More surprising is Blackburn’s assertion that Democrats want to “cancel” members of the country’s armed forces while President Donald Trump has “stood by” the troops.

Trump, after all, is a man who kicked off his first presidential campaign by declaring that John McCain, who spent years as a POW in Vietnam, wasn’t really a war hero. “He was a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people who weren’t captured.”

Trump is a man who viciously slandered the family of Humayun Khan, a Muslim Army captain and bronze star recipient who was killed in the Iraq war.

And Trump is a man who smeared Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, a purple heart recipient who dared to tell the truth about Trump’s Ukraine scandal. Just days after the end of his impeachment trial, Trump retaliated against Vindman and his twin brother, firing both of them from their positions on the National Security Council. Canceling them, if you will.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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