October 6, 2016

Here Is Your Morning Donald

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One of Donald Trump’s favorite words is “strong.” He came out “strongly” against the Iraq War. Vets who are “strong” don’t get PTSD. We have to be strong against ISIS, strong on law-and-order, strong against illegal immigrants, and strong on guns. On Wednesday, he even preemptively insisted he’d eventually be strong on an issue he knew nothing about:

I’m gonna take a very strong look at it and I will come very strongly one way or the other. I will have an opinion.

Trump was in Nevada and was asked about the nuclear waste facility being built at Yucca Mountain. He actually admitted he knew nothing about it, but then said that once he did know something—BOOM! He’d be strong. Very strong.

In other Trump news, we learn that back during his bankruptcy days, Trump’s own lawyers always met with him in pairs. Why?

In other words, Trump lied to his own lawyers so routinely that they had to have backup whenever they met with him. His. Own. Lawyers.

Elsewhere, we learn that Asian-Americans really, really don’t like Trump. This is from the Fall 2016 National Asian American Survey, released yesterday:

Trump is losing to the rest of the field by ratios of 2:1 all the way up to a staggering 10:1, with an average of 4:1 against him. That’s bad, but I’m not sure it’s strongly bad. He needs to up his game. I don’t think he’s insulted Asian-Americans lately,1 but if he did he could probably drive his support down to 15 percent or even lower. Come on, Donald.

1But then again, maybe he has. It’s hard to keep up.

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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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