June 21, 2018

Melania Trump Has No Fucks Left to Give

Melania Trump flew to Texas today to visit migrant children held in federal detention camps. Here’s what she wore:

Her spokesperson told reporters, “It’s a jacket. There was no hidden message.”

This is, obviously, a lie. Melania Trump is a former fashion model who is consistently careful and exacting about the clothes she wears. Everybody knows this. It means something.

But the funny thing is that I doubt it means she doesn’t care about the kids. Even the most xenophobic lunatic in the Republican Party wouldn’t imply that they don’t care about the kids, and it’s unlikely in the extreme that Melania deliberately decided to send this message. So what message is she sending? My guess: something Donald related. She’s saying, sure, she’ll do the First Lady thing and go to Texas in place of her husband, but really, she doesn’t care about what he wants or needs anymore.

Maybe. Basically, though, I’m as stumped as everyone else.

UPDATE: Donald Trump says the message “refers to the Fake News Media. Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares!” On the assumption that everything Trump says is a lie, I’d say we can probably rule this out.

I suppose it could refer to this, but Peter Fonda isn’t a reporter and he apologized yesterday. So … I dunno. Nothing really makes sense, but for now I’m sticking with my original guess.

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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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