Trump: Fed Not Helping My Reelection Campaign Enough

Here’s a trip down memory lane:

September 12, 2016: Candidate Donald Trump whines that the Fed should be raising interest rates, but won’t because it’s protecting the economy for Obama. “Any increase at all will be a very, very small increase because they want to keep the market up so Obama goes out and let the new guy … raise interest rates … and watch what happens in the stock market.

Two years pass, during which the Fed raises interest rates….

June 22, 2019: “I am at Camp David working on many things, including Iran! We have a great Economy, Tariffs have been very helpful both with respect to the huge Dollars coming IN, & on helping to make good Trade Deals. The Dow heading to BEST June in 80 years! Stock Market BEST June in 50 years!

Today: “Despite a Federal Reserve that doesn’t know what it is doing – raised rates far too fast (very low inflation, other parts of world slowing, lowering & easing) & did large scale tightening, $50 Billion/month, we are on course to have one of the best Months of June in US history….Now they stick, like a stubborn child, when we need rates cuts, & easing, to make up for what other countries are doing against us. Blew it!

Two years ago Trump said the Fed was raising rates too slowly. Today he says they raised rates too fast. If anybody bothers to ask—and it hardly seems worth the trouble—I’m sure he’ll say that he’s always wanted low interest rates. He did say he was a “low interest rate person,” after all. In any case, this gives him a handy, demagoguish excuse to haul out when the economy declines on his watch because he forgot to time his tax cut to help his reelection campaign.

Hey, remember back when Trump said he had been against the Iraq War from the start, even though he wasn’t? Good times.

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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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