March 1, 2018

It’s Just Another Day on “As the White House Turns”

Kevin Dietsch/CNP via ZUMA

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Another cunning plan bites the dust:

The planned announcement had been kept secret from many senior White House officials in an effort to prevent a huge backlash that could sway Trump at the last second.

This is all about trade policy. Apparently a small cabal within the White House was pushing Trump to announce new tariffs on steel and aluminum today, but kept it a secret from everyone else. When everyone else found out, the shit hit the fan and the announcement died a quick death.

What a way to run a White House. It’s like watching all the amateur schemers on Survivor. I thought John Kelly was supposed to clean up this kind of thing, but as near as I can tell he’s just decided to join one cabal or another for each of these little spats.

UPDATE: After telling the press that today’s announcement would be only about “general trade issues,” Trump decided to announce the new tariffs after all. I guess after getting his ear at the last second, someone else got his ear just a few milliseconds later. So tariffs it shall be.

What a circus.

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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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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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