Trump Is Meeting With Kim Jong Un! Wait, Maybe Not. Wait. Yes He Is.

Michael Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

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There are a bunch of headlines today suggesting that Trump is backing off his promise to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. At first this seems like a strained reading of something Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at today’s press briefing, but if you read farther in the transcript someone finally asks a follow-up question that made it very clear what she was saying:

Q: Sarah, you said they promised to denuclearize. Did they promise to denuclearize or did they promise to talk about denuclearizing?

SANDERS: The understanding, the message from the South Korean delegation is that they would denuclearize. And that is what our ultimate goal has always been, and that will have to be part of the actions that we see them take.

Q: Is that before or after the meeting?

SANDERS: We’d have to see concrete and verifiable actions take place.

Q: Before the meeting?

SANDERS: Yes. Yeah.

Sanders is clear they want to see verifiable denuclearization before the meeting. Not that they would talk about denuclearizing, but that they’d actually start doing it before the meeting could take place. But a little later there was this:

In other words, who knows what’s going on? As usual, the Trump White House is a well-oiled machine.

POSTSCRIPT: You know how live TV shows are delayed a few seconds so that censors have time to bleep out bad words? Maybe we need a new rule like that about Trump: Nothing he announces should be reported for 48 hours. After that, if he hasn’t changed his mind, it can be printed or broadcast. How else do you deal with a serial dissembler like Trump who routinely says stuff just for the headlines?

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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.

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