British Prime Minister Is Latest To Be Pissed Off at Donald Trump

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The Trumpies just don’t know when to quit:

The White House has tried to soothe an angry Britain after suggesting that President Barack Obama used London’s spy agency to conduct secret surveillance on President Trump while he was a candidate last year.

….Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, spoke with Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to Washington, on Thursday night to try to smooth over the unusual rupture between the United States and its closest international ally. The White House said it would issue a statement later on Friday morning.

The flap started when Mr. Spicer, in the course of defending Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated accusation that Mr. Obama had ordered the future president’s phones tapped last year, read from the White House lectern comments by a Fox News commentator asserting that the British spy agency was involved. Andrew Napolitano, the commentator, said on air that Mr. Obama had used Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, the signals agency known as the GCHQ, to spy on Mr. Trump.

It’s like I said yesterday: Trump needs to get it through his head that he’s now the president of the United States. It’s not Rosie O’Donnell he’s feuding with anymore. When he tosses off random crap because he’s bored and wants attention—and then refuses to back down because Donald Trump never backs down—he wastes everyone’s time and risks far more than just his own tattered reputation.

The result so far of Trump’s obvious lie is that the Senate is wasting time pretending to investigate; the House is wasting time pretending to investigate; the Justice Department is wasting time responding to the House and Senate; the conservative media is wasting time inventing ever more crap to defend Trump’s original crap; the White House communications shop is wasting time desperately trying to research spin to back up their boss; and the prime minister of Great Britain is pissed off. All because Trump got bored one morning. What a cock-up.

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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.

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