August 9, 2017

Donald Trump’s North Korea Comments, Explained

OK, fine, let’s write about the North Korea thing. When Donald Trump says something truly preposterous, the usual response is for someone in the White House to suggest anonymously that he didn’t really mean it. This can take many forms, and today it took this one:

Goodness. How could these morons interpret “fire and fury like the world has never seen” as a nuclear attack? He was just talking about, um, a new and improved kind of napalm. Or, you know, a really spectacular Aurora Borealis. Or a really nasty tweet. We also have this:

Ah, so this wasn’t a prepared statement after all. I thought that sounded iffy from the start. Trump was just looking at an opioid fact sheet. This explains a lot of things, as my exclusive blow-up of the document shows:

Meanwhile, Rex Tillerson is telling us that the US is totally willing to talk things over with the North Koreans: “I think the president just wanted to be clear to the North Korean regime that the U.S. has the unquestionable ability to defend itself, will defend itself and its allies, and I think it was important that he deliver that message to avoid any miscalculation on their part.”

Yeah. Trump was just trying to avoid any miscalculations. That’s the ticket.

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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.

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