Swamp Watch – 7 December 2016

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Another cabinet appointment today? Does Donald Trump even pretend to vet any of these folks? Beats me. But yes, there’s a third appointee today: Linda McMahon, of professional wrestling fame, will head up the Small Business Administration. (This is a cabinet-level post, so it goes on the list.) McMahon and her husband founded the WWE empire and are worth over $1 billion, so that’s officially the third billionaire in his cabinet. Plus there’s Trump himself, of course, so that’s four. That’s 0.7 percent of all the billionaires in the country—so far.

Among other things, the McMahons have nearly single-handedly funded the Trump Foundation since 2007. Earlier this year they gave $6 million to Trump’s campaign. Normally this gets you an ambassadorship to, say, Sweden, but the McMahons are longtime pals, so Linda gets a spot in the cabinet instead. The official excuse is that she helped build the WWE from a small business into an empire, so she knows just what small businesses need. Works for me.

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GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

1) If you value the journalism we do but haven’t pitched in over the last few months, please consider doing so now—we urgently need a lot of help to make up for lost ground.

2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

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