February 25, 2016

Why the Hell Won’t Anyone Attack Trump?

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A few hours after declaring that he had no plans to attack Donald Trump—“I didn’t run for office to tear up other Republicans”—Marco Rubio launched this attack on Donald Trump:

At a rally late yesterday, Rubio called out Trump by name and faulted him for being insufficiently hostile to Obamacare and insufficiently supportive of Israel. “He thinks parts of Obamacare are pretty good,” Rubio scoffed, before casting himself as the only true scourge of the law. Rubio noted that Trump “has said he’s not going to take sides on Israel versus the Palestinians because he wants to be an honest broker.”

News reports marvel at the fact that Rubio mentioned Trump by name. Greg Sargent calls his attack “searing.” I call it…what? Pathetic? Mystifying? An attack deliberately meant to fail?

Come on. Even tea partiers like the part of Obamacare that protects people with pre-existing conditions, and that’s the part Trump says he supports. And with the exception of Rubio’s neocon pals, even hardcore Republicans don’t much object to candidates keeping up a pretense of being honest brokers between the Israelis and Palestinians. They all know it’s done with a wink and a nudge.

In other words, Rubio is “attacking” Trump on the very things that will hurt him the least. So what’s the point? Even in the realm of 11-dimensional chess I can’t figure this out. If anything, this “attack” is likely to help Trump, not hurt him.

There are, needless to say, lots of puzzling and mysterious features of the Donald Trump phenomenon. But surely one of the most puzzling is the weird aversion that all the other candidates have to really going after him. I’m not talking here about the fact that attacks don’t seem to have much effect on Trump. I’m talking about the fact that no one has been willing to mount any kind of sustained, powerful attack at all. It’s crazy. These guys are Republicans. They were born to attack. It’s the party of Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. It’s the party of Willie Horton and the Arkansas Project and swift boating. But all we’ve seen against Trump are the occasional hesitant pitty-pats.

WTF is going on? I know all about the collective action issue blah blah blah. That’s not enough. Trump has been the frontrunner for months, and it’s obvious that his supporters value toughness. Take down the alpha, and you get the alpha’s followers. What is everyone so afraid of?

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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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