13 Things Donald Trump Was Right About

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Donald Trump spent most of the weekend saying awful things about Megyn Kelly, after the Fox News host had the temerity to question him at last Thursday’s debate about his history of saying awful things about other women. That shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise: Hurling insults at people who cross him is basically the entire point of Donald Trump.

But when he’s not saying bad things about Kelly, Hillary Clinton, Rosie O’Donnell, women more generally, black people, Mexicans, President Barack Obama, various members of the press, John McCain, or Mohawks, Trump also makes a lot of good points.

Here are 13 things Trump has been right about:

The invasion of Iraq: In 2003, he told the Dallas Morning-News that the Iraq War had been a “disaster” that “should not have been entered into.” “To lose all of those thousands and thousands of people, on our side and their side, I mean, you have Iraqi kids, not only our soldiers, walking around with no legs, no arms, no faces,” he said. “All for no reason. It is a disgrace.”

Katy Perry shouldn’t have married Russell Brand:

Trump was right. The marriage dissolved after 14 months; it clearly wasn’t meant to be.

Campaign finance: Although Trump bragged (falsely) about having cut checks to most of the Republican candidates with whom he shared the stage last week, he also made some smart points about the corrupting influence of campaign contributions. “I will tell you that our system is broken,” he said during the debate. “I give to many people. I give to everybody, when they call I give, and you know what? When I need something from them, two years, three years later, I call, they are there for me.”

Material excess: “While I can’t honestly say I need an eighty-foot living room, I get a kick out of having one,” he wrote in his most famous book, The Art of the Deal. Both of these statements sound pretty true.

Harvard:

No one likes Harvard.

The merits of his cologne, which is actually called “Success” and features notes of juniper, iced red currant, frozen ginger, vetiver, and tonka bean: Granted, you can’t buy it in stores anymore because no one bought it, but Success gets 4.5 stars on Amazon.com. User “Kim” writes:

My boyfriend LOVES this cologne. They used to sell it at Macy’s but it was discontinued and he was running low around Christmas time…when I told him it was discontinued he was sad that he would have to find another cologne now..but then I found it online here and I was so happy! And it was ALOT cheaper than I used to pay at Macy’s! ($62) and it was the big sized bottle like he wanted and it was perfect and he was so happy.

Dick Cheney: “He’s very, very angry and nasty,” Trump said in a 2011 review of Cheney’s book. “I didn’t like Cheney when he was a vice president. I don’t like him now. And I don’t like people that rat out everybody like he’s doing in the book. I’m sure it’ll be a bestseller, but isn’t it a shame? Here’s a guy that did a rotten job as vice president. Nobody liked him. Tremendous divisiveness. And he’s gonna be making a lot of money on the book. I won’t be reading it.”

Himself: “I’m a whiner,” he told CNN on Tuesday.

The Drug War: In 1990, well before the political tides had shifted in favor of pot legalization, Trump was declaring the federal government’s mass-incarceration campaign a waste. “We’re losing badly the war on drugs. You have to legalize drugs to win that war. You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.”

RedState’s Erick Erickson, who disinvited Trump from the conservative site’s confab last weekend due to his remarks about Megyn Kelly:

When he’s right, he’s right.

“Fuckface von Clownstick” is not an original insult:

National health care: “We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing,” he wrote in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve.

Tom Brady:

#FreeTommy.

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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.

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