January 3, 2018

Donald Trump Unfriends Steve Bannon

Julie Dermansky via ZUMA

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I guess Donald Trump and Steve Bannon are no longer best friends:

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency.¹ When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer² who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates….Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look….Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was.³ It is the only thing he does well.

I wonder who wrote this? It has the general tone of Trumpiness, but not the syntax. Miller, maybe? In any case, this is apparently a response to Michael Wolff’s book excerpt in New York today, which I haven’t read yet because I was too busy bollixing up my medical inflation figures for a couple of hours until I got them right. Apparently Bannon was a prime source for the book, as he has been for so many juicy gossip items over the past year. I guess I should read it over lunch.

¹Bannon is practically the definition of Trump’s presidency.

²“Staffer” = CEO of the Trump campaign.

³This part is actually true.

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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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