November 5, 2020

Trump Just Spoke. He Was Dishonest, Desperate, and Dangerous.

Evan Vucci/AP

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To call the speech President Trump gave at the White House Thursday evening a “news conference” wouldn’t be right. For 17 minutes, he repeated dangerous lies about the legitimacy of the election results—claims so outrageous that even the conservative New York Post called them “baseless.” Fox News anchor John Roberts noted that the president we saw tonight “believes that at the end of the day…the election is not going to go his way” and is trying to plan an “alternate route” to retain the White House. 

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” he began. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.” To be clear, there is no deadline by which votes must be counted, and a person is more likely to get struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud. The president is, again, lying.

Trump also claimed that he won the state of Pennsylvania, which has not yet called a winner. His margin of victory in the state did get “whittled down”—his words—following the initial reporting of results, but that’s because the state is still continuing to count mail-in votes, which have largely favored Biden. And it’s no wonder mail-in votes aren’t a boon for the president: Trump has spent the last several months trying to delegitimize mail-in ballots, which offer a safer alternative to voting in person amid a pandemic.

After he wrapped up, Trump refused to take questions from the press, slinking out of the briefing room:

Trump’s comments are as dangerous as they are dishonest—a sitting president attempting to undermine the legitimacy of an election while votes are still being counted is unprecedented in United States history. CNN’s normally understated Anderson Cooper summed it up: “That is the most powerful person in the world, and we see him like an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over, but he just hasn’t accepted it, and he wants to take everybody down with him, including this country.”

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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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