October 5, 2020

6 Things You Missed If You Spent the Past Week Under a Rock

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I spent very little time online last week because I was driving a U-Haul, loaded with all my possessions, the 1,800 miles from New York City to Denver. I didn’t think I would miss that much. Here’s what happened instead:

  • The New York Times obtained years of President Trump’s tax returns and reported that he’d paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017. He also wrote off $70,000 in haircuts and styling as business expenses.
  • Trump squabbled with Joe Biden during what many people considered the worst debate in memory. I listened to about 45 minutes of it on NPR before turning the radio off in disgust.
  • A former aide to the first lady leaked secretly recorded audio of Melania Trump complaining about the media’s focus on family separations at the border and its failure to appreciate the hard work she put in decorating the White House for Christmas. But that story didn’t get a lot of play because shortly thereafter…
  • Trump got COVID. The eventuality we all considered but never really believed would happen actually happened. Surely, we thought, Trump exists within his own 6-foot personal bubble at all times. Surely, anyone who enters that bubble has tested negative. Not so.
  • And Trump wasn’t the only one to get sick. So did Melania Trump. So did Kellyanne Conway. And Chris Christie. And Thom Tillis. And Kayleigh McEnany. And many more people who came in contact with our reckless, superspreader president.
  • Instead of recuperating at the White House, or at the hospital, Trump showed just how much he cares about his Secret Service agents by getting in a car with them, risking their health so he could drive around and wave at his supporters.

Did I miss anything?

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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.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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