Dr. Sean Conley displaying his "upbeat attitude" to the press on Sunday.Michael Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

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Chris Evans caught this little bit of misdirection yesterday:

And it turns out that President Trump was put on oxygen a couple of times over the past couple of days but his doctors didn’t tell us. Why not?

Trump’s doctors, speaking on the steps of the military hospital where he was being treated for a third consecutive day, again refused to answer key questions about his condition, including the timing of the president’s second dip in oxygen, which they neglected to mention in multiple statements the day before, or whether lung scans showed any damage.

Pressed about the conflicting information he and the White House released the previous day, Navy Cmdr. Dr. Sean Conley acknowledged that he had tried to present a rosy description of of the president’s condition. “I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude of the team, that the president, that his course of illness has had. Didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction,” Conley said.

In a broad sense, I suppose none of this probably matters much. It seems likely that Trump is in fact doing OK and will recover soon. But in another sense it’s the very triviality of this stuff that’s telling. They lie and lie and lie about everything, whether they need to or not. And then they wonder why no one believes them.

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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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