No, There Is No Sense To Be Made of Trump’s Tweets

From the Washington Post today:

Can we just stop this? There is no “sense” to be made of Trump’s tweet. It’s random argle bargle that floats out of his brain. Here’s where the argle bargle comes from:

  • Water from many of California’s biggest rivers flows into the San Joaquin River Delta.
  • From there it empties into the Pacific Ocean, but over the years more and more of this water has been diverted via levees, dikes, embankments, and canals. This diverted water goes to local farmland, and eventually flows south into Southern California.
  • There is an argument about just how much of the Delta’s water should be diverted from its natural course and how much should be allowed to flow naturally out to sea. The argument is complicated, but in a nutshell: farmers want more water diverted while environmentalists want to save the Delta.

This is as much as Trump knows. It’s probably much more than Trump knows. He know there’s some kind of dispute about the water; he knows that farmers are on the side of water not going out to the ocean; he knows that farmers are good and environmentalists are bad; therefore, keeping more of the water in irrigation channels would somehow provide more water for fighting fires.

It isn’t really worth “explaining” this or “fact checking” it or “making sense” of it. There’s no “it” to make sense of. It’s a five-year-old making mud pies and being praised for it by Fox News and a bunch of Twitter trolls. This makes it news, and thus some explanation must be ginned up.

But there isn’t one. It’s the meaningless blathering of a moron. Stop trying to explain it.

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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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