August 15, 2016

The Trump Campaign Is Off the Rails Again—And It’s Only Going to Get Worse

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The New York Times reports today on the latest about Paul Manafort, favored lobbyist of sleazy dictators worldwide and currently Donald Trump’s campaign chairman:

Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief

Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau.

…The papers, known in Ukraine as the “black ledger,” are a chicken-scratch of Cyrillic covering about 400 pages taken from books once kept in a third-floor room in the former Party of Regions headquarters on Lipskaya Street in Kiev. The room held two safes stuffed with $100 bills.

That sounds pretty bad. Still, I suppose it could be worse. For example, Manafort could—eh? What’s that, Adam Weinstein?

Well, so much for the latest pivot to normalcy for the Trump campaign. It was already in pretty tattered shape after his Sunday Twitter rant about how unfairly the media mistreats him. Unsurprisingly, a lot of Republicans are finally concluding that a Trump pivot away from uncontrolled ranting and raving will never happen. Politico reports that “party leaders have started talking about cutting off support to Trump in October and redirecting cash to save endangered congressional majorities.” I can’t say that I blame them. I only wonder why they’re planning to wait until October.

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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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