June 25, 2023

Republicans Stand by Their Mess

New polls show that despite multiple indictments, Donald Trump still has a big lead in the GOP primary.

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Donald Trump, a twice-impeached (for now!), twice-arrested former president, remains the GOP voters’ top choice to be commander-in-chief. They do not appear bothered by the fact that Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse, nor do they seem to care that he faces 37 federal charges related to his tendency to store classified documents like this. That, of course, is in addition to facing 34 felony counts related to Trump’s alleged hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. 

No, Republican voters don’t seem tired of any of these historically bad milestones. That’s at least the big takeaway from two new polls released this week. But has Trump’s support actually grown amid his mounting legal peril—or is it simply a static feature of this GOP, something you can count on because Trump is simply still alive and running for president? He claimed the former on Saturday, telling an adoring crowd at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference that he’s “probably the only person in history” to get indicted, only to have his “numbers go up.”

The data on that seems to be mixed. According to NBC, Trump’s support among Republican primary voters grew 5 percentage points, from 46 percent in April to 51 percent in June. Meanwhile, a CNN poll released Tuesday suggested that Trump’s support has dipped among Republicans, from 53 percent in May to 47 percent in June.

Either way, Trump’s grip on Republicans remains strong. Perhaps that explains why they don’t mind literally paying for his legal defense.

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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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