February 11, 2017

Reality Just Keeps Biting President Trump in the Ass

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Donald Trump’s implicit appeal during the presidential campaign was his status as a complete outsider, a proverbial bull in a china shop who didn’t care if pearl clutching elites took to their fainting couches while he turned their Ivy League world upside down. Was he ignorant? Sure, maybe, but that’s what the country needed: someone with common sense who would just go ahead and do the right thing and not worry about smashing the crockery along the way.

But just as Theresa May and her fellow Brexiteers are learning that the real world is more complicated than they thought, Trump is learning that just because he doesn’t know something doesn’t mean it’s not important:

President Trump, who presented himself as a staunch supporter of Israel during last year’s campaign, took a harder line on settlements in an interview published on Friday and indicated that he was rethinking his promise to move the United States Embassy to Jerusalem….Mr. Trump and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, have been exploring an Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative that would enlist Arab allies, and a host of Arab leaders have told the new president that provocative pro-Israel positions would not help.

….“They don’t help the process,” Mr. Trump said of settlements in the Israel Hayom interview. “I can say that. There is so much land left. And every time you take land for settlements, there is less land left.” He added: “I am not somebody that believes that going forward with these settlements is a good thing for peace.”

Imagine that. Trump and Kushner have talked to Arab leaders—for the first time ever, I imagine—and discovered that they have big issues with things like settlements and Jerusalem. It wasn’t just a bunch of milksop lefty nonsense after all. It was reality.

But this lesson still hasn’t filtered down to his UN ambassador:

This is all very Trumpish: Obama coddled the Palestinians, therefore we don’t like them and oppose their appointment to anything. As it turns out, a moment’s worth of consultation would have informed Haley that Salam Fayyad is widely respected, including within Israel. He’s long been a moderate, anti-Hamas, anti-corruption voice in the Palestinian Authority, and he was appointed to the Libya mission by a newly installed UN chief who is notably more sympathetic to Israel than his predecessors. The “signal” his appointment sent was a very pro-Western one.

But once again, bumper stickers won the day.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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