January 14, 2019

24 Hours of Trump in Less Than a Hundred Words

Ting Shen/Xinhua/ZUMA Wire

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So let’s see. In the past 24 hours Donald Trump has:

  • Suggested Elizabeth Warren should do campaign ads with her husband dressed in full Indian garb.¹
  • Mocked Jeff Bezos over his divorce.
  • Quoted Patrick Buchanan on border security.²
  • Retweeted Geraldo Rivera saying the FBI is … I’m not sure … deranged or corrupt or something.
  • Said the fake news has “truly gone MAD.”
  • Claimed that gas prices are down because he deregulated energy.³
  • Rejected his pal Lindsey Graham’s proposal to re-open the government.
  • Warned that he would “devastate” Turkey if they attacked the Kurds.

And that’s only a single day! I understand that Trump has already passed that test where you have to distinguish an elephant from a pinball machine, but I wonder if we could use something a little more sophisticated. He sure seems to be going downhill fast.

¹Why not Warren herself? That is a mystery.

²Buchanan’s statistics about the number of arrests by ICE are not actually wrong, as near as I can tell, but he leaves out a lot. For example, here is our current “crisis”:

³For what it’s worth, gasoline prices are down because oil prices are down. And why are oil prices down? This has nothing to do with any deregulation fantasies, since none of Trump’s proposals have gone into effect yet. The real reason oil prices have dropped is because (a) in October the market got worried about a glut in oil supplies, (b) Trump then handed out lots of waivers to his sanctions on Iran, which reduced fears that Iranian oil shipments would halt, and (c) everyone is worried that Trump’s erratic economic policies make a recession this year more likely.

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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.

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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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