Donald Trump Chats With Russian and Chinese Spies Each Night

The New York Times reports today that our commander-in-chief uses a personal iPhone that’s insecure and routinely surveilled by Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies. Despite being warned repeatedly about this, he continues to use it to call up his friends and yak all night long:

White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them….They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.

My spirit has been crushed over the past two years and I am no longer truly surprised by anything Donald Trump does or by how the Republican Party collectively shrugs about it. I meet each new revelation with a thousand-yard stare and then a robotic move of the mouse to see if there’s any other news I might be interested in.

And yet. Occasionally something still produces a tiny flicker of neurotransmitters somewhere in the vicinity of my amygdala. When that happens, I blink my eyes as if awakening from a stupor and take a closer look at the text on my computer screen. Text like this:

White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.

Trump is a Republican, right? This is the party that spent two years pretending to be outraged that Hillary Clinton used an unclassified network to respond to an email about a phone call to the newly-elected president of Malawi. But their reaction to the president of the United States chatting merrily away on a phone that we know the Russians and Chinese are listening in on? Apparently nothing.

But, you know, President Obama once saluted a Marine while holding a coffee cup in his hand. So I guess there’s plenty of justified outrage on both sides, amirite?

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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.

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