June 21, 2018

Melania Trump Has No Fucks Left to Give

Melania Trump flew to Texas today to visit migrant children held in federal detention camps. Here’s what she wore:

Her spokesperson told reporters, “It’s a jacket. There was no hidden message.”

This is, obviously, a lie. Melania Trump is a former fashion model who is consistently careful and exacting about the clothes she wears. Everybody knows this. It means something.

But the funny thing is that I doubt it means she doesn’t care about the kids. Even the most xenophobic lunatic in the Republican Party wouldn’t imply that they don’t care about the kids, and it’s unlikely in the extreme that Melania deliberately decided to send this message. So what message is she sending? My guess: something Donald related. She’s saying, sure, she’ll do the First Lady thing and go to Texas in place of her husband, but really, she doesn’t care about what he wants or needs anymore.

Maybe. Basically, though, I’m as stumped as everyone else.

UPDATE: Donald Trump says the message “refers to the Fake News Media. Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares!” On the assumption that everything Trump says is a lie, I’d say we can probably rule this out.

I suppose it could refer to this, but Peter Fonda isn’t a reporter and he apologized yesterday. So … I dunno. Nothing really makes sense, but for now I’m sticking with my original guess.

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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.

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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?

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