January 26, 2019

Day After Shutdown Surrender, Trump Is Having One Sad Morning on Twitter

The president appears to be acting as if his own announcement ending the shutdown never happened.

Yuri Gripas/ZUMA

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President Donald Trump’s announcement that he would agree to a short-term spending bill to reopen the government after the longest shutdown in American history—the very same deal he had previously rejected more than a month earlier—marked one of the most bruising defeats of a presidency replete with bad days.

That sting of failure, the second major concession Trump has made to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi since the shutdown started, was visible from the president’s Twitter account late Friday into the next morning, as he attempted to convince supporters that the shutdown deal was not at all a concession, as nearly all major news outlets, pundits, and even the president’s fiercest supporters were characterizing.

“I wish people would read or listen to my words on the Border Wall,” Trump lamented hours after the agreement was announced. “This was in no way a concession.”

That didn’t appear to cajole the typically Trump-friendly Lou Dobbs or Ann Coulter—two fierce proponents of the border wall. “I mean, she has just whipped the president of the United States,” Dobbs said, referring to Pelosi, on his Fox News program on Friday. He continued: “You know, I’m an animated, energetic supporter of this president but you’ve got to call it as it is: This president said it was going to be conditional, border security building that wall and he just reversed himself. That’s a victory for Nancy Pelosi.”

The abandoned support is clearly weighing on the president, who spent much of Saturday morning tweeting as if his own announcement on Friday never 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.

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