October 29, 2018

Trump Had to Be Begged to Make Strong Synagogue Statement

From the New York Times:

For months, Republican officials have complained privately that President Trump lacks the ability to confront moments of crisis with moral clarity, choosing to inflame the divisions that have torn the country apart rather than try to bring it together. It took the importuning of his Jewish daughter and son-in-law to craft a powerful statement of outrage at anti-Semitism after Saturday’s slaughter at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Then Mr. Trump went back into partisan mode, assailing his enemies. By the evening’s end he was tweeting about baseball, and on Sunday he went after another foe.

Eleven Jews are slaughtered by an anti-Semitic maniac in a synagogue and Trump had to be “importuned” by his daughter to issue a strong statement denouncing it. Normally I might think this is just another example of Ivanka and Jared touting their influence to the press, but this kind of thing doesn’t make anyone look good. So it’s probably true. Unbelievable, but true.

As for why Trump had to be talked into this, that’s simple. Trump believes himself to be the president not of the whole country, but only of those who voted for him. The Jewish community didn’t, so he doesn’t care about them.

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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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