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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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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