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I’m not sure why I bother, but here’s a non-exhaustive list of Donald Trump’s big lies. I’m not talking about all the little stuff that automatically dribbles out of his mouth whenever his lips are moving. I’m talking about the big, policy-level lies that he repeats over and over at rallies and on TV. Here’s a sample:

  • Obamacare premiums are up 30, 40, 50%. Wrong. On average, premiums were up about about 9 percent in 2016. If you account for subsidies, the average premium went up about $8, an increase of 7 percent.
  • Among Syrian refugees, there are very few women and children. It’s mostly “young, strong men.” False. According to the UN, something around 10 percent of Syrian refugees are males between the age of 15-25. The rest are women, children, and older men. Among refugees who have made the trip to Europe, probably about half are men, but for an obvious reason: it’s an arduous and dangerous journey, and the men hope to find jobs, get asylum, and then bring in their families later.

What makes this even more interesting is that Trump obviously knows these are lies and doesn’t care. I was browsing through the PolitiFact file on Trump, and pretty much everything they’ve written includes a sentence something like this: “We reached out to the Trump campaign but they didn’t respond.”

They don’t care. Trump knows it’s BS, and he doesn’t even bother making up bogus justifications, the way ordinary politicians do. He knows the media will never really call him on this stuff. Repeat it often enough, and eventually maybe the reporters covering him will even start to believe it themselves.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

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.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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