BinC Watch: Trump Knows All the Best People

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Donald Trump has based his entire campaign on the idea that the government is managed by idiots and will run better once he appoints smart people to head things up. The smartest, in fact! So who has he appointed so far? Let’s take a look:

VP search: Ben Carson, then Corey Lewandowski. Carson is the guy whose ignorance during the debates was so stupefying that even the Republican base rejected him. Lewandowski’s job is to follow Trump around wherever he goes.

Foreign policy: Keith Kellogg, Joseph Schmitz, George Papadopoulos, Walid Phares, and Carter Page. Huh? “I don’t know any of them,” said a former official in the George W. Bush State Department. “National security is hard to do well even with first-rate people. It’s almost impossible to do well with third-rate people.”

Muslim ban commission: Rudy Giuliani. Nuff said.

Tax plan: Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore. Kudlow is a CNBC talking head. Moore is the Heritage Foundation hack who wrote a column so riddled with errors that the Kansas City Star announced, “There will be no future Heritage pieces published that don’t get thorough factchecking.”

The best and the brightest! I can’t wait until the federal government is fully staffed with people of this caliber.

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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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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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