January 9, 2018

Here Is My Full-Scale Crisis Communications Plan for Donald Trump

Kevin Dietsch/CNP via ZUMA

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LOL:

The White House is struggling to contain the national discussion about President Trump’s mental acuity and fitness for the job, which has overshadowed the administration’s agenda for the past week….Trump privately resents the now-regular chatter on cable television news shows about his mental health and views the issue as “an invented fact” and “a joke.”

….Some Trump allies voiced frustration that the White House does not appear to have implemented a full-scale crisis communications plan. “When you raise an issue like the mental acuity of the president, there is no organized effort to push back,” said one ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly. “How do you disprove a fallacy?”

Actually, fallacies are disproven all the time. That’s why they’re called fallacies in the first place. In this case, it would be easy to disprove that Trump is a moron, and in a spirit of bipartisan magnanimity I’m going to reveal how to do it free of charge. Are you ready? Here it is:

Have Trump give a live TV interview in which he addresses policy issues in depth and shows that he has actual, demonstrable knowledge of a variety of topics. Points will be deducted for every meandering mention of (a) Hillary Clinton, (b) fake news, (c) his record-breaking election victory, (d) the FBI, (e) the unfairness of the Russia investigation, (f) his IQ, (g) collusion between Democrats and Russia, (h) how he personally turned around the economy, or anything else that’s so off-topic it’s not even in left field.

A bright high school senior could do this, so the bar is set pretty low. You don’t need a full-scale crisis communications plan. This is all it would take.

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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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