February 13, 2017

John Oliver Returns with a Brilliant Plan to Fight Donald Trump’s Lies

“How did we get a pathological liar in the White House?”


Following a two-month hiatus, John Oliver returned to Last Week Tonight on Sunday to focus on President Donald Trump’s shaky relationship with the truth and his administration’s consistent rejection of basic facts.

“How did we get a pathological liar in the White House?” Oliver asked, before exploring the source of Trump’s lies (Breitbart and Alex Jones’ conspiracy-ridden website, Infowars) and why his supporters are willing to accept false information.

To tackle Trump’s reliance on “alternative facts,” Oliver revealed he’s launched a series of commercials to run during shows the president is known to regularly watch, such as Morning Joe and Fox & Friends, that sneak in useful pieces of information he might need over the next four years. Such ads include explanations on global warming, the female anatomy, and the name of his lesser known daughter, Tiffany Trump.

Watch:

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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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