August 12, 2016

Donald Trump Is Recycling LBJ’s “Pig Fucker” Strategy

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Donald Trump says Barack Obama is the “founder” of ISIS. Let’s hear his explanations for this. First, there’s this, on the Hugh Hewitt show yesterday:

HH: I know what you meant. You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.
DT: No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. I do…. It’s no mistake.

So he meant it literally. Then there’s this, about 20 seconds later:

HH: I’d just use different language to communicate it….
DT: But they wouldn’t talk about your language, and they do talk about my language, right?

So he didn’t mean it literally. It was deliberate hyperbole in order to get people talking. Then there’s this, from the wee hours of this morning:

It was just sarcasm! Why don’t you people get this?

So why does Trump do this stuff? The most likely explanation, of course, is that he’s a child who can’t control his mouth, and then invents transparently dumb excuses when he’s caught with his hand in the cookie jar. But there’s another possibility.

Everyone remembers the famous LBJ quip about why he called his opponent a pig fucker, right? Johnson admitted it wasn’t true, but “I want him to have to deny it,” he explained.

Well, what have we been talking about for the past few days? First, that Hillary Clinton doesn’t really want to eliminate the Second Amendment. She just wants background checks and so forth. Then, that Obama and Clinton aren’t really the founders of ISIS. They just created the vacuum that helped ISIS thrive.

This probably won’t help Trump. But it might. Getting the media to obsess for days about Hillary Clinton’s position on gun control and her part in the rise of ISIS doesn’t really do her any good. When you’re explaining, you’re losing.

In fact, done more adroitly, this might be a pretty diabolical strategy. Unfortunately for Trump, he’s so ham-handed about it that it hurts him more than it does Hillary. So far, anyway. But if he gets better at it, you never know.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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