Trump: Weak Economy Is Fake News, But We Still Need a Huge Stimulus

According to Donald Trump, the economy is booming: all the talk of a possible recession is just fake news and Democratic propaganda. America has the best economy in the world and, possibly, the best economy in all of human history.

Also according to Donald Trump, we need an immediate gigantic cut in interest rates and a big reduction in the payroll tax in order to . . . um, stimulate a weak economy? But that can’t be. Trump says our economy, as always on his watch, is “very strong.”

It’s a mystery, but not a very baffling one: facts don’t matter anymore. Politics is now just a matter of who can invent the most potent fantasy. Here is Jennifer Rubin on Trump’s economic record:

President Trump came into office promising some fabulous yet unspecified health-care plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. No plan existed…. Trump said he’d bring back manufacturing. In fact, it slowed and now has slumped…. Trump said he’d get tough on drug companies. He hasn’t. He said his tax cut would be aimed at the middle class, deliver $4,000 a year to the average American family and permanently boost business investment, pushing growth above 3 percent. Nope, nope and nope…. The biggest economic lie was Trump’s declaration that trade wars are quickly and easily won, American consumers and farmers wouldn’t be hurt and we somehow would get richer by making Americans pay more at stores. Actually, they are paying a lot.

Rubin is in her element these days. She’s always been very compelling in an attack-dog-attorney kind of way, but it never worked that well back when she was hating on President Obama. There just wasn’t enough there, and it forced her to stretch and exaggerate too much. Now there’s no such problem. Hating on Trump is easy, and there’s really never any need for anything but the bare truth. It’s all clover for someone with a lawyerly mind.

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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.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

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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