August 28, 2023

Trump Trial Set to Begin Day Before Super Tuesday

Alex Brandon/AP

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Former President Donald Trump’s trial for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election is set to begin the day before voters in more than a dozen states will decide whether he should have another shot at the White House.

Depending on how Trump plays it, this could either be a catastrophic scheduling conflict or a major boon to the former president’s campaign. But Trump had requested that the trial begin in April 2026, suggesting that he isn’t pleased about having to juggle his legal obligations with his professional ones. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors, led by special counsel Jack Smith, had requested that the trial begin in January 2024.

Trump has already set the expectation that he’ll take on the 2024 campaign from the sidelines. Last week, he chose not to attend the first Republican presidential debate. Instead, he spoke with Tucker Carlson in an interview broadcast on Twitter. In spite of everything, he remains the GOP presidential frontrunner.

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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.

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