Quote of the Day: What Bush Thought Of Trump’s Inauguration


On January 20th,  Donald Trump was inaugurated president in a nightmare I somehow am still unable to wake  from. You may remember it! It was poorly attended and he was very upset and spent like a week crying and made his press secretary go out and lie about the attendance and then was mad at that same press secretary not for lying but for wearing ill-fitting suits. These are all things that happened only months ago and yet the trauma, tragedy, and sheer ridiculousness of the last few months make them feel like a lifetime ago.

Another thing that is real and happened once in life is that the US in the olden days—the Before Time—had this president named George W. Bush who was the son of another president named George Bush. (What’s that saying? ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on Humpty-Dumpty. Fool me three time, the baby is going out with the bath water’?) Neither of them were very good presidents. Indeed, the Younger was quite unGood. Started an unnecessary war against the wrong country, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. Liked clearing brush in Texas. He’s a painter now.

These two surreal characters, each of which would be considered an unrealistic element in an even moderately good screenplay, shared screen-time during the inauguration. Obama and Clinton, and the other presidents former, were there too. Some others as well. Not many but some.

So what did the last Republican president think of the current Republican president’s inauguration?

According to occasional Mother Jones contributor Yashar Ali’s report in New York Mag, not much!

But, according to three people who were present, Bush gave a brief assessment of Trump’s inaugural after leaving the dais: “That was some weird shit.” All three heard him say it.

A spokesman for Bush declined to comment.

He’s not wrong!

Have a super evening but don’t forget to, before you go to sleep tonight, fold your hands and pray that in the morning we all wake up and it’s 1999 and none of this ever happened.

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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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