March 28, 2020

Trump Says He Might Announce an “Enforceable Quarantine” of New York Area

Tasos Katopodis/CNP via ZUMA

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Update, 9:30 pm ET: No quarantine.

President Donald Trump says he may announce a two-week quarantine for residents of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York as soon as today.

“We might not have to do it,” Trump told reporters on Saturday, “but there’s a possibility that sometime today we’ll do a quarantine—short term, two weeks—for New York, probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut.” Trump’s maybe-maybe-not approach is likely to only add to the chaos being caused by the new coronavirus.  

Trump said travel could be restricted from the three states “because they’re having problems down in Florida”—a key swing state in the 2020 election. “A lot of New Yorkers are going down [to Florida],” Trump said. “We don’t want that.” The president said he’d spoken by phone with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a vocal Trump supporter who has been widely criticized for his response to the pandemic.

Trump added before boarding Marine One that it would be an “enforceable quarantine,” saying, “I’d rather not do it, but we may need it.” The president followed up his quarantine comment with a similar tweet.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) said Saturday that he hadn’t spoken with Trump about the possibility of a quarantine. “I haven’t had those conversations. I don’t even know what that means,” Cuomo said at a press briefing. “I don’t know how that could be legally enforceable, and from a medical point of view I don’t know what you would be accomplishing.”

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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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