August 16, 2015

Donald Trump Still Unclear About His Own Talking Points

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Donald Trump gets serious!

RADDATZ: Let me ask you a serious foreign policy question. What would you do about ISIS using chemical weapons?

TRUMP: I think it’s disgraceful that they’re allowed and you can’t allow it to happen and you have to go in and just wipe the hell out of them.

RADDATZ: What do you do? Do you go in with ground troops?

TRUMP: What did you say? Say that again.

Ah, the old “I can’t hear you over the crowd noise” routine. I see that Trump is picking up political pointers from the pros already. He’s a quick learner.

Over on NBC, he has his usual addled conversation with Chuck Todd, but I see that he hasn’t been getting pointers from his policy advisors:

DONALD TRUMP: No, not at all. Look, we are a debtor nation. We owe, I mean, now it’s 1.9 trillion, okay? I’ve been saying 1.8. Now, it’s 1 point — it’s really kicked in. It’s soon going to be 2.4 trillion dollars, okay? That’s like a point, whether you believe in the great economists or not, that seems to be a point of no return. That’s where we’re Greece on steroids, okay?

This is one of the dozen or so talking points that Trump uses as his random answer to whatever happens to have been asked, and yet he still doesn’t actually understand it. The number he’s trying to pull from his brain is 19 trillion, not 1.9 trillion. Since Trump is obviously good with figures and would never misstate, say, the buying price of a property, it’s hard to avoid the obvious conclusion that he doesn’t really have the slightest idea about—or interest in—the size of the national debt and what it means. It’s just a good applause line.

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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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