September 2, 2018

David Hogg Raises Thousands to Put Donald Trump’s Old Ted Cruz Tweet on Texas Billboard

“…to remind Texans of the truth.”

Facing an unexpectedly strong challenge from Democrat Beto O’Rourke, Ted Cruz solicited the help this week of Donald Trump. The president will be coming to Texas next month to bolster his one-time rival’s reelection bid.

“Ha ha ha,” the world responded to the news that Cruz had sought help from a man he once called “a sniveling coward,” a man who repeatedly slandered his wife, a man who alleged his father conspiring to kill JFK. “Ha ha ha.”

Now it seems that chorus of laughter has grown so loud it will soon extend beyond its humble origns on the internet. 

A GoFundMe page by USA Latinx seeking to put one of Donald Trump’s anti-Cruz tweets from 2016 on a billboard raised nearly $10,000 in one day, nearly doubling its fundraising goal.

“President Donald Trump will be campaigning to help Sen. Ted Cruz win his re-election. A rally is being planned, according to Trump “at the biggest stadium in Texas,” the page organizers write. “We are planning to display the presidents own words about Cruz from 2016 on a mobile billboard, to remind Texans of the truth.”

The tweet in question dates back to February 2016 when Trump and Cruz were campaigning for the GOP presidential nomination ahead of the Texas primary.

It was one of many tweets activists could have chosen:

One of the campaigns organizers is March for Our Lives co-founder David Hogg, the Stoneman Douglas High School student who along with his classmates was thrust into the national spotlight after February’s tragic shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Last month, Mother Jones had a chance to talk with Hogg and some of his fellow classmates about their surprising and inspiring journey to remake American politics. You can listen to the podcast here.

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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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