Here’s a Better Answer to Donald Trump’s Supporters

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Tonight’s Democratic debate featured a short exchange about Donald Trump:

MUIR: You have weighed in already on Donald Trump….What would you say to the millions of Americans watching tonight who agree with him? Are they wrong?

HILLARY CLINTON: Well I think a lot of people are understandably reacting out of fear and anxiety about what they’re seeing….Mr. Trump has a great capacity to use bluster and bigotry to inflame people and to make think there are easy answers to very complex questions.

I suppose this is the “right” answer in some sense, but if you take seriously the framing of the question—what would you say to Trump’s supporters?—it’s condescending and offensive. You’re telling them that they only support Trump because they’re scared, not because they have legitimate beefs. That’s not likely to win many converts.

I’m a little surprised that no one has taken the approach toward Trump that strikes me as having a better chance of success. Basically it has two parts:

#1: Trump is a mediocre businessman. He talks big about his golf resorts, but they don’t make a lot of money. His casinos in Atlantic City went bankrupt because he managed them poorly and didn’t understand the business. He doesn’t have a lavish property empire. He’s built or renovated half a dozen major buildings, and they’ve done OK but nothing more than that. There’s no evidence that he negotiates especially great deals, just fairly routine ones. He’s thin-skinned and goes to court—or threatens to—over every perceived slight. Basically, Trump inherited a lot of wealth and hasn’t done all that much with it. Someone should ask him to show us financial statements for his development business. Not licensing and TV. Just development. How much have earnings increased over the past decade? What’s his return on equity? Return on investment? Etc.

#2: Trump is a blowhard, and we all know blowhards, right? They BS constantly because they don’t know squat. They talk big and they never deliver. That’s Trump. What makes anyone think he’ll deliver on all the BS he’s ladling out right now?

Trump has built two successful businesses based on being a blowhard. He has a nice licensing business, and he made a nice chunk of change from The Apprentice. That’s about it. In every business that required him to actually deliver something concrete, he’s been average or worse.

Trump has built his campaign on the proposition that he’s a great builder and a great negotiator, and for some reason his opponents have all let that slide. I don’t really understand why. Take away his mouth and he’s just another guy who inherited a bunch of money from his father and used it to build a middling business. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but it hardly makes him a dazzling executive, either.

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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.

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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