October 23, 2018

Fake Tax Cut Now Embellished With Fake Details

How can you tell he's lying? Because his mouth is open.Song Qiong/Xinhua via ZUMA

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Well, we’ve now sailed far beyond the Isle of Lies and straight into the Maelstrom of Making Shit Up:


There is no tax cut planned. There’s never been a tax cut planned. Trump just tossed this out while he was in a lather about something else and noticed that it got a good reception. So he repeated it. And why not? Republicans love tax cuts. Now everyone is starting to get aboard, and we’re even getting some fake details about this fake plan. It’s going to be revenue neutral! It will be for the middle class—honest! It will be paid for by Mexico!

I dunno. Once again, the campaign press is in its usual bind. I’m sure every campaign reporter out there knows this is just another one of Trump’s fantasies, spun out solely to get attention from campaign reporters. And yet … he is the president of the United States. Whatcha gonna do?

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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.

payment methods

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