June 23, 2016

Donald Trump Is Frying My Brain

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Here is Donald Trump talking to an evangelical audience on Tuesday about how he raised his children:

I always tell people, “No drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes.” And I add to some — if it’s appropriate: I say, if they go to church and if they start at a young age, that’s a tremendous asset…. I went to Sunday school at First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica…. It was like, you go to Sunday school, you have to do that…. Today, I don’t think it’s so automatic. And maybe we can get back into a position where it’s automatic.

I know I’ll never get an answer, but I have to ask: Did any of Trump’s kids go to Sunday school back in the day? Does Barron go to Sunday school now? Does Trump ever attend church? How about his grown kids? Just asking.

You might have noticed that this item is from yesterday. So was the picture of Trump with Jerry Falwell Jr. My post this morning about Utah v. Strieff is two days late. What’s going on with that? Well, you know how your inbox can get filled up and you just get behind on everything? That’s how I feel. My brain is hopelessly backed up and I’m behind on everything. Sometime tomorrow I’ll finally figure out what happened today.

I blame Trump for this. He’s brought a level of gobsmacking idiocy to the news that worms its way into my brain and won’t let go. I get obsessed with what he’s blathering about. Did he really say that? And people believed it? There has to be something more to it. But what? Has our national bullshit detector suddenly gone pear shaped? Why? How is it that 45 percent of the country apparently doesn’t realize that he’s basically just a talented used car salesman? It makes no sense. There’s no way that anyone with even the slightest experience of real life could fail to see that he lies practically every time he opens his mouth. That he can’t be trusted to do even the smallest thing he promises. What’s going on? WTF. IS. GOING. ON?

This is my brain on Trump. It wants answers. But there are no answers. Just endless, endless spinning. It is trapped in a world gone haywire.

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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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