October 30, 2018

Will the Media Fall For Trump’s 14th Amendment Stunt?

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The 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship. That is, if you’re born on American soil, then you’re an American citizen, full stop. This applies to everyone born here—even if their parents are in the country illegally—including people of Hispanic descent like Mexicans and Hondurans.

By an amazing coincidence, Donald Trump has suddenly decided—seven days before an election—that he can repeal this part of the 14th Amendment with an executive order. David Frum explains:

A week before the election we have an “invasion” of brown people from the south. We have declarations that these brown people are diseased. We have 5,000 troops ordered to the border. We have dark intimations of “closing off” the border completely. And now we have the end of birthright citizenship.

All of this is designed to bring hate and fear to a fever pitch just before Election Day. If that means a few killings in Pittsburgh and Kentucky, well, it’s the media’s fault.

And for once, Trump has a point. All of Trump’s fear-mongering would be for nothing if the media didn’t report so breathlessly about it. Today will be a test. Repealing the 14th Amendment via executive order is a pure publicity stunt. It has no basis in history or reality, and there’s no reason to give it more than just the briefest dose of oxygen. Let’s see what CNN and the others do about it.

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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.

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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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