June 6, 2017

Your Evening Trump Roundup

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Things we’ve learned in the past few hours:

Russiagate #1: After James Comey’s meeting with Donald Trump in February, in which Trump asked him to shut down the Russia investigation, Comey told Attorney General Jeff Sessions that he didn’t want to be left alone with Trump ever again.

Russiagate #2: In March, Trump explicitly asked Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, to help him get Comey to back off the Russia probe. After discussing this with other officials, Coats “decided that intervening with Comey as Trump had suggested would be inappropriate.”

Eric Trump: For years, Eric Trump hosted a golf tournament to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. Use of the golf course was donated by Donald Trump. At least, it was until 2010, when Donald suddenly decided that Eric’s charity tournament would have to pay full freight for use of the facilities. In fact, Eric had to pay more than anyone plausibly thinks a weekend rental of the course could possibly cost. “Even if the Eric Trump Foundation had to pay the full rate for literally everything, Forbes couldn’t come up with a plausible path to $322,000 given the parameters of the annual event (a golf outing for about 200 and dinner for perhaps 400 more).” There are plenty of other niggling little questions at the link about the Trump family’s approach to charity.

Our solar wall: If Mexico isn’t going to pay for the wall, maybe we can turn it into a moneymaker all on its own. Apparently Donald Trump has proposed that we build the wall 50 feet high, cover it with solar panels, and then sell the electricity. Sigh.

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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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