November 12, 2020

Here’s Why Donald Trump Will Never Give Up

Chris Kleponis/CNP via ZUMA

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In the LA Times today, Nick Goldberg asks the question on everybody’s mind:

What exactly are we witnessing here? Is this an attempted coup — a real effort by President Trump to cling to power despite the outcome of the election? Or is it a pathetic, doomed-to-fail tantrum by a petulant sore loser who will soon cave under pressure?

It’s neither. The real answer requires us to take seriously what so many of us have been saying all along: Donald Trump is mentally unbalanced. To put it a little more conventionally, he’s such an extreme narcissist that he can’t believe he lost. He literally can’t believe he lost. So his brain makes up stories for him, and the only plausible story in the face of hard numbers is that his enemies cheated. So that’s what he believes. And he’ll believe it forever. There’s no more chance of changing his mind on this than there is of changing the mind of someone in an asylum who believes he’s Jesus Christ.

As usual, though, this leads us back to the real question: Why is nearly the entire Republican Party humoring him on this? Since they aren’t collectively insane, the only answer is that they’re willing to sacrifice the public’s belief in democracy for short-term partisan gain. That isn’t nuts. It’s just despicable.

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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.

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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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