January 14, 2019

24 Hours of Trump in Less Than a Hundred Words

Ting Shen/Xinhua/ZUMA Wire

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So let’s see. In the past 24 hours Donald Trump has:

  • Suggested Elizabeth Warren should do campaign ads with her husband dressed in full Indian garb.¹
  • Mocked Jeff Bezos over his divorce.
  • Quoted Patrick Buchanan on border security.²
  • Retweeted Geraldo Rivera saying the FBI is … I’m not sure … deranged or corrupt or something.
  • Said the fake news has “truly gone MAD.”
  • Claimed that gas prices are down because he deregulated energy.³
  • Rejected his pal Lindsey Graham’s proposal to re-open the government.
  • Warned that he would “devastate” Turkey if they attacked the Kurds.

And that’s only a single day! I understand that Trump has already passed that test where you have to distinguish an elephant from a pinball machine, but I wonder if we could use something a little more sophisticated. He sure seems to be going downhill fast.

¹Why not Warren herself? That is a mystery.

²Buchanan’s statistics about the number of arrests by ICE are not actually wrong, as near as I can tell, but he leaves out a lot. For example, here is our current “crisis”:

³For what it’s worth, gasoline prices are down because oil prices are down. And why are oil prices down? This has nothing to do with any deregulation fantasies, since none of Trump’s proposals have gone into effect yet. The real reason oil prices have dropped is because (a) in October the market got worried about a glut in oil supplies, (b) Trump then handed out lots of waivers to his sanctions on Iran, which reduced fears that Iranian oil shipments would halt, and (c) everyone is worried that Trump’s erratic economic policies make a recession this year more likely.

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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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