June 3, 2019

Donald Trump Is Just a Bad Dream

Yui Mok/PA Wire via ZUMA

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London mayor Sadiq Khan doesn’t like Donald Trump much:

This is a man who tried to exploit Londoners’ fears following a horrific terrorist attack on our city, amplified the tweets of a British far-right racist group, denounced as fake news robust scientific evidence warning of the dangers of climate change, and is now trying to interfere shamelessly in the Conservative party leadership race by backing Boris Johnson because he believes it would enable him to gain an ally in Number 10 for his divisive agenda. Donald Trump is just one of the most egregious examples of a growing global threat.

The funny thing is that although Khan is right, I don’t really agree with him. That is, Trump has done all that stuff, but I don’t think he’s much of a global threat.

Maybe my glasses are rosier than they should be, but I view Trump as authoritarian in the same way that I view five-year-olds as authoritarian: they yell, they cry, they whine, they demand that everything be about them, but in the end nobody pays them any serious attention. Who cares about a five-year-old’s routine tantrums, after all?

Now, it’s true that Trump can do more damage than a five-year-old, but not that much more. After all, even his allies and supporters basically agree that he’s a buffoon. The only things they really wanted from him were a tax cut and a bunch of conservative judges, and they got that. Beyond that they mostly just humor him.

If Trump weren’t so ignorant and unaware, he might be a serious danger. But he is, so he’s not. It’s possible that his relentless race baiting has done some serious damage, but even there I suspect that his impact is fleeting. If we get rid of Trump in 2020, it will be like waking up from an outlandish dream. Within ten minutes it will all be forgotten and no one will ever care about anything he says or does again.

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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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