Trump Fundraiser Says You’ll Be Screwed If You Don’t Get on Board Now

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith was at Mitt Romney’s big annual bash in Park City this weekend, which fairly seethed with anti-Trump sentiment. However, Trump had an ally in attendance: Anthony Scaramucci, the former Obama supporter who became a former Romney supporter who became a former Scott Walker supporter who became a former Jeb Bush supporter and is now a Donald Trump fundraiser. This history suggests that Scaramucci doesn’t actually care much for Trump, but hey—he’s a hedge fund manager. He’ll sell whatever dog food he has to sell. And right now that’s Donald Trump.

But Smith’s story sure doesn’t make Scaramucci look very effective in this role. “Scaramucci tried a series of approaches in quick succession,” the story says, but those approaches look to me like they came from a sixth grader. You don’t want eight more years of government regulation, do you? You don’t want to abandon Paul Ryan, do you? You don’t want to hurt the Republican Party, do you? And anyway, Trump “needs your wisdom,” possibly the most hilarious serious sales pitch anyone has ever made on behalf of Trump. These are all pathetically obvious approaches. Then Scaramucci tried a harder sell:

“Let me ask you one other question,” he said. “What if he wins?”

“Do you want Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs to be the secretary of state and Gary Busey to be on the Supreme Court?”

This, Scaramucci suggested, is what Republicans can expect if they don’t get on the Trump Train now. (Combs and Busey — who Trump fired in 2013 on Celebrity Apprentice — support Trump. However, the candidate’s actual appeal to Republicans is how very very responsible he will be about Supreme Court appointments.)

“Everybody should oppose him, he wins anyway, and he should open the tent?” he asked, shaking his head.

Wait. WTF is this supposed to mean? It sounds like Scaramucci is saying that if mainsteam Republicans oppose him but Trump wins anyway, Trump is going to give the establishment a big fat middle finder by appointing two idiots to the Supreme Court. Because, you know, at least the idiots supported him from the beginning.

That’s the sales pitch for Donald Trump? I dunno. Scaramucci’s a rich guy, so I guess he knows how to sell. But if he ever offers his services to me, I think I’ll politely decline. On the bright side, though, I learned that the guy who wrote How to Find Your Fortune Without Losing Your Soul is now supporting Donald Trump. That was good for a laugh this morning.

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.

payment methods

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.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate