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Today’s big news is the overall implosion of the Donald Trump campaign. He’s repeatedly melted down on the stump over the past month. He’s trailing Hillary Clinton by a mile in the latest polls. He fired his campaign manager this morning. His ego apparently doesn’t allow him to beg other people for money, so he’s barely done any fundraising at all. The fight to stop him at the Republican convention now has the support of nearly 400 delegates. With the election only 20 weeks away, he still has virtually no staff. He’s being hammered by negative advertising on TV and isn’t doing anything to fight back. (So far he’s run exactly zero ads.)

Except for the personal meltdown stuff, all of this is basically a money problem. Trump doesn’t have any. In fact, pretty much everything you need to know about Trump’s campaign—and his underlying  business acumen, though that’s a story for another time—is captured in FEC form 3P. As you can see, it shows that Trump ended the month of May with $1.28 million on hand. That’s disastrous. It’s unbelievable. It’s less than a tenth of what he should have. It’s less than a well-run congressional campaign should have. It’s $40 million less than Hillary Clinton’s campaign has. It’s Donald Trump in a nutshell.

So will he just finance the campaign out of his own wallet? Not a chance. Bluster aside, he doesn’t have the ready cash to do it. And he wouldn’t even if he could. After all, this is the guy who eagerly transferred the five-figure salary of his longtime bodyguard to his campaign at the first opportunity. Do you really think he’s ready to blow $500 million on a nearly certain losing cause?

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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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