Donald Trump Finally Admits He Wants to Build the DAPL Pipeline

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This should surprise no one:

For the first time, Donald Trump has said he supports finishing construction of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline….The company behind the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, had donated $100,000 to a Trump Victory Fund before the election in the hopes that he’d greenlight it.

….There’s also a seedy financial twist here: Last week, disclosure forms suggested that Trump himself had as much as $300,000 personally invested in the project. That explains why his transition team had to clarify that Trump’s support “has nothing to do with his personal investments and everything to do with promoting policies that benefit all Americans.”

This is a win-win-win-win for Trump:

  • It’s a project that provides a bunch of blue-collar jobs.
  • He gets to come out against a Native American tribe and its whining about “sacred lands,” something that his base of real Americans will surely appreciate.1
  • A big donor gets what it wants.
  • And Donald gets a little cut of the action for himself.

What’s not to like? The only surprising thing is that it took Trump this long. I wonder why it didn’t become a staple of his campaign speech months ago?

MoJo has had lots of coverage of this, so I haven’t spent too much time on it. But there is one thing I’m curious about. There’s already a gas pipeline called the Northern Border Pipeline that crosses the Missouri River at the site of the DAPL project. That’s one of the reasons the DAPL folks want to build there, and I assume it also figures into the Army Corps of Engineers’ thinking. If they approved the gas pipeline decades ago, what justification do they have for not approving a second pipeline in the same place? I only bring this up because I almost never see it mentioned in coverage of the DAPL protests. But surely this has some impact on what the Corps can do legally?

1Please note sarcastic tone here.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

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