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In the absence of a vaccine, enough ventilators to contain the coronavirus, or a president capable of putting the country’s needs ahead of his reelection campaign, it’s tempting to dismiss Trump’s press conferences as the propaganda pageants they are—and back slowly away from his Twitter account, a feeding ground for the world’s largest ego, luxuriating in its own likes.

Can we? Mute @realDonaldTrump for a minute? No. We’d miss too many high-impact statements that have real consequences in our lives, whether we cringe at his tweets or not, from a president who one conservative New York Times columnist charitably calls a “sociopath,” a designation more and more experts are making—marked by extreme lack of conscience and empathy in favor of delusional self-praise.

Even if you’re not in the diagnosis business, I do wonder if this country’s spirits wouldn’t be lifted by watching Trump undergo a devastating brush with something more consequential, ruthless, and upending than anything else: a copy edit.

Here, in the name of national security and public hygiene, is an emergency deployment of the finest tool Mother Jones has available: the annotation feature. Click on the highlights below, like this, to instantly improve the president’s tweets and our country’s health.

96-0 in the United States Senate. Congratulations AMERICA!

“My Administration is actively planning the next phase in an all-out war against this horrible virus.”

I love Michigan, one of the reasons we are doing such a GREAT job for them during this horrible Pandemic. Yet your Governor, Gretchen “Half” Whitmer is way in over her head, she doesn’t have a clue. Likes blaming everyone for her own ineptitude! #MAGA

I just signed the CARES Act, the single biggest economic relief package in American History – twice as large as any relief bill ever enacted. At $2.2 Trillion Dollars, this bill will deliver urgently-needed relief for our nation’s families, workers, and businesses. #CARESAct🇺🇸

General Motors MUST immediately open their stupidly abandoned Lordstown plant in Ohio, or some other plant, and START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!!!!!! FORD, GET GOING ON VENTILATORS, FAST!!!!!! @GeneralMotors @Ford

Invoke “P” means Defense Production Act!

….I have been packed all day with meetings, I have no time for stupidity. We’re working around the clock to KEEP AMERICA SAFE!

On the recommendation of the White House CoronaVirus Task Force, and upon consultation with the Governor’s of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, I have asked the @CDCgov to issue a strong Travel Advisory, to be administered by the Governors, in consultation with the….

For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect….

If the Fake News Opposition Party is pushing, with all their might, the fact that President Trump “ignored early warnings about the threat,” then why did Media & Dems viciously criticize me when I instituted a Travel Ban on China? They said “early & not necessary.” Corrupt Media!

The Lamestream Media wants us to fail. That will NEVER happen!

If additional literature from @realDonaldTrump needs a constitutional touch-up, send it to styleguide@motherjones.com and we’ll update this post with a few of the finest. #MAGAZINE 🇺🇸

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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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