July 26, 2020

There Is a Lot Going on in This Trump Tweet. Let’s Try to Unravel It.

President Donald Trump returned to Twitter this afternoon with a missive jam-packed with information, yet completely opaque in their connections to each other. As you can see, there’s a lot going on here:

Let’s start with the inspiration for this tweet. University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato yesterday tweeted a Washington Post story about how the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, which runs the late president’s library, asked the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee to stop selling coins with Reagan’s face on them as a fundraising strategy. (It’s important to understand that the Reagan folks did not ask the Trump folks to stop selling Reagan coins because they don’t like Trump. From the article, it appears simply to be a copyright issue; only the Reagan Foundation can profit off of the former president’s face.) Sabato then noted the connection between the Reagan Foundation and the Post: someone named Frederick J. Ryan Jr is in a leadership role at both places. 

Trump took this connection and really ran with it. He seems to blame the dustup between his campaign and the Reagan Foundation on the Post, which he claims the Post controls.

In the same sentence, Trump—possibly inspired by the tweet to meditate on people with the Ryan, possibly just confused—next expresses his displeasure with former Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Fox News. These two belong together in this sentence because this Ryan is on the board of Fox, the parent company of Fox News.

Finally, Trump concludes that he will win reelection 100 days from now because the polls, including the ones from Fox News, are fake. 

Mystery solved.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists 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 hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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