November 20, 2020

Geraldo Has an Idea to Get Trump to Leave: Name a Vaccine “The Trump”

Such a gesture, he suggested, could work to cheer up our septuagenarian baby president.

In an effort to mitigate the sting of defeat, Fox News contributor Geraldo Rivera has suggested that a forthcoming vaccine be named after Donald Trump. Such a gesture, he said on Friday, could work to cheer up our septuagenarian baby president as he continues to rely on dangerous conspiracy theories to reject political reality.

“I had an idea: With the world so divided, and everyone telling him he’s got to give up and ‘Time to leave’ and ‘Time to transition,’ why not name the vaccine after Trump?” Rivera told the hosts of Fox & Friends. “It would be a nice gesture to him.”

The fantasy went even further. Rivera imagined a future—one that presumably survived the president’s disastrous handling of the pandemic—featuring Americans saying to one another: “‘Have you got your Trump yet?’ ‘I got my Trump, I’m fine.'”

“I wished we could honor him in that way.”

The utter sincerity with which Rivera broached this idea should not be lost here; he genuinely appears to believe that Trump is not only deserving of such scientific recognition but that it could work as some kind of consolation prize for losing the presidential election. Meanwhile, more than 250,000 people in the United States have been killed by the virus—and the country’s third surge has only just begun.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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