November 24, 2018

Here’s What President Trump Was Doing Over the Thanksgiving Holiday

Tweeting.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

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While millions of people spent time with their loved ones over the Thanksgiving holiday, maybe doing a little shopping on Black Friday, President Trump spent the last few days firing off tweets about Chief Justice John Roberts, global warming, the media, and immigration. 

On Wednesday night, two days before his administration dropped a damning climate report which warns that the planet will be three degrees warmer by 2100, the president tweeted a blatantly false myth about climate change.

Whenever it’s unusually cold, as it was for much of the Eastern United States on Thanksgiving day, the most determined climate deniers announce the cold weather disproves that global warming is real. Trump said the same thing during a 2017 cold snap. 

On Thanksgiving day, Trump resumed attacking Chief Justice John Roberts and the Ninth Circuit. In a rare response from a Chief Justice to a President, Justice Roberts criticized Trump for calling a federal judge who ruled against the administration’s asylum policy, an “Obama judge.” Roberts said there were no such thing as Obama judges or Bush judges, but that these judges were independent. 

Trump responded via tweet, “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges.'”

The president further described the Ninth Circuit as a “disaster” and said that if law enforcement officials aren’t able to do their jobs there will be “bedlam, chaos, injury, and death.”

On Black Friday Trump took a shot at the media in response to a Wall Street Journal story describing his dissatisfaction with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. According to the report, Trump isn’t happy with Jerome Powell, Mnuchin’s pick for chair of the Federal Reserve because  he has been raising interest rates, an economic move the president worries will hurt his 2020 re-election campaign. According to the president, the story is riddled with “phony sources” and “jealous people.”

The president’s Twitter account appears to be quiet for now…but there’s always Sunday. 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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