January 11, 2018

Fox & Friends Needs to Stop Confusing the President

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Fresh off his surprising public announcement that he favored the Democrats’ approach to immigration reform—a position that was quickly “clarified” by other Republicans in the room—President Trump tweeted this after getting confused by a Fox & Friends segment:

This was a little peculiar since Trump supports the extension of FISA. Josh Marshall:

“Two hours later at 9:14 AM, apparently after someone explained to him that he was attacking his own bill, the President tweeted this. “With that being said, I have personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office and today’s vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land. We need it! Get smart!” There is of course a rather intense debate about whether these powers should exist at all. But President Trump is misstating what the law actually does. More importantly, he just made policy, or temporarily changed his policy without his staff knowing, based on something he watched on Fox and Friends.

Trump’s initial tweet sent Congress into a temporary tizzy, but I think everyone is drawing the wrong conclusions from this. Sure, it’s yet more evidence that Trump is a moron, but more importantly it shows that Fox & Friends is not taking its constitutional role seriously.

These guys know that Trump is watching, and they know that Trump is easily confused. We all understand that he’s declined over the past couple of years, and America’s well-being depends on Fox & Friends switching to a simpler format and being more careful to explain to Trump what he does and doesn’t support. We all have patriotic duties in these difficult times, and Fox & Friends needs to make sure it doesn’t confuse the commander-in-chief early in the morning before his staff is ready to take over that job.

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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.

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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