September 4, 2015

In Shocker, Media Learns That Donald Trump Doesn’t Know Anything

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Color me surprised. I read Hugh Hewitt’s interview with Donald Trump yesterday and commented on it, but it didn’t even occur to me to say anything about the substance of Trump’s replies. I mentioned as an aside that Trump, as usual, was “comically ignorant” of pretty much everything, and thought no more about it. That’s just standard Trump.

But today’s headlines are all about Trump’s “struggles,” “stumbles,” and “gaffes.” That’s all totally fair, but why did it take this interview to suddenly wake everyone up? Trump has been responding to questions this way for the entire campaign. Ask him about China, and he says he’ll send Carl Icahn over. Ask him how he’ll get Mexico to pay for a wall, and he says “management.” Ask him about taxes and he says he’ll be great for the middle class. Ask him for his favorite Bible verse and he claims that’s too personal to share.

This has been his MO all along. His ignorance—and his shameless lack of interest in fixing it—has always been obvious. He doesn’t even try to hide it. He’ll hire good people. He’ll delegate. He’ll learn it when he needs to. He’s entirely up front about not knowing squat, and it’s barely even caused a ripple. Until now. Suddenly everyone is shocked to learn that Trump doesn’t know the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah.

I guess it was bound to happen sometime. Perhaps the Trump show was just too entertaining to ruin with this kind of pedantry back in August. What would we all have written about without him?

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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.

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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.

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