March 27, 2017

BREAKING: Donald Trump Played Golf This Weekend

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The sad thing about this tweet is that it really would be news if Donald Trump was at the White House working this weekend:

But no: Trump played golf at his club in Virginia this weekend, so it’s not clear what Fox was up to here. Perhaps they meant to say that by 5:26 pm on Sunday, Trump was back in the White House.

Normally, I’d suggest that everyone cool it with the golf snark. We’ve now had four consecutive presidents who have taken endless grief every time they hit the links, and it’s pretty stupid. Let ’em golf if they want to. But there are two differences with Trump. First, the guy really does play a ton of golf. You’d think the first few months of a new presidency would be a busy time, but Trump has played 12 rounds of golf, mostly at Mar-a-Lago, in only ten weekends. That’s more than he played before he was president. Second, like an embarrassed drunk, he’s now trying to hide his golf addiction. This weekend marked the second in a row in which his press office tried to pretend that Trump was “meeting with people” at the club, only to have Trump’s golfing exposed, as they must have known it would be, by someone with a cell phone tweeting out pictures. Why do they bother with such flimsy and easily exposed lies?

And while we’re on the subject of Trump, I’d like to note that he’s hit the quadfecta I predicted on Thursday. He has now blamed all four of the following for the failure of Trumpcare:

  • Paul Ryan, for insisting on doing health care before tax reform and then being unable to shepherd the bill through the House.
  • The Freedom Caucus, for voting against his bill.
  • Democrats, for…being the opposition party, I guess.
  • Obama, for deliberately designing Obamacare to fail in 2017.

Apparently Reince Priebus is also taking some heat from within the White House, because he’s pals with Ryan and was supposed to know about all this congressional hoo ha. But it’s not clear if Trump himself blames Priebus for anything.

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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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