June 25, 2019

People Are Finally Getting Bored by Trump

The incredible shrinking president.

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Forget the polls. What really matters is that Donald Trump’s ratings are down:

The shock factor around President Trump’s unplanned announcements, staff departures, taunting tweets and erratic behavior is wearing off, and media companies are scrambling to find their next big moneymaker…. Digital demand for Trump-related content (number of article views compared to number of articles written) has dropped 29% between the first 6 months of the Trump presidency and the most recent 6 months, according to data from traffic analytics company Parse.ly.

I’ve always figured this would happen. Americans get bored with their TV gossip phenoms pretty quickly, and the faster they go up the faster they come down. Trump rode TV to victory, and now he’s dealing with the inevitable ratings decline.

But who knows? Maybe he can reinvent himself. Or maybe he can find a new topic to mesmerize the viewing public. Or maybe he can start a war.

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We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

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