March 26, 2017

Trump Throws Ryan Under the Bus in the Classiest Way Possible

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On Friday—that’s 24 hours ago for those of you with short memories—President Trump insisted that he had no hard feelings toward Paul Ryan. Ryan had worked hard on the health care bill, and it was just bad luck that it failed. In fact, it was really the fault of the Democrats, who hadn’t provided a single vote. Not one!

However, experienced Trump watchers noticed a brief aside: he mentioned that there were a few things he would have done differently—but he wasn’t going to talk about that. This is Trump code for “I’m not to blame and I won’t be able to bottle up my whining for long. I definitely will talk about these things eventually.”

So how long would Trump be able to hold his tongue? A few days? A whole week? Nope. About 18 hours, it turned out:

And here’s what Jeanine Pirro said a few hours after that on her Fox News program:

What a guy. Within 24 hours Trump is sticking a shiv in Paul Ryan’s back without even a pretense of keeping it private. He doesn’t have the guts to tell Ryan to his face, so instead he uses a TV show to pass along the message.

The real message, of course, is that no one should ever work with Trump. He’ll throw you under the bus at the first hint that he needs someone to take the blame for something that went awry. And maybe Ryan should take him up on this. When John Boehner retired and Kevin McCarthy flamed out, Republicans were literally left with no plausible candidates for Speaker who were acceptable to all factions of the party. Ryan was the only one who came close, so if he quits the GOP is in for some real chaos. That’s just what they need as they try to get a budget in place and start work on a hugely complex tax cut for the rich.

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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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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.

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