January 3, 2018

Voter Fraud Storyline Axed in “Donald” Season 2

Kris Kobach was hoping his misfit character would become a regular, but "Donald" audiences never warmed to him. His contract wasn't renewed for season 2.Mark Reinstein via ZUMA

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The scriptwriters for The Donald Show are getting lazy with their story arcs. I mean, take a look at their latest punt:

Episode 2017.1: Donald is desperate to prove that he won the greatest presidential victory of all time. But how?

Episode 2017.2: Cheating! That’s the ticket. His offscreen arch-nemesis Hillary hoovered up millions of votes from Mexicans who are in the country illegally.

Episode 2017.3: Donald asks kooky recurring character Kris Kobach to head a commission to look for the extra votes.

Episode 2017.4: Kobach promptly rounds up a gang of misfits and starts delivering subpoenas. Hilariously, even his own state doesn’t comply.

[The storyline is abandoned for months and the audience begins to wonder if it’s ever coming back. Is the Trump administration becoming the Lost of presidencies?]

Episode 2018.1: Donald announces that the commission has been dissolved. The end.

WTF? Not even a little flashback to tell us what happened to Kobach? Did he slip on a banana peel? Get run over by a neo-Nazi? This plotless, meandering show has always been an acquired taste, but now it’s just getting tired. Can it last another couple of seasons at this rate?

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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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