May 8, 2020

Quote of the Day: Maybe Testing Isn’t So Great After All

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One of Mike Pence’s aides tested positive for coronavirus today. President Trump says this is why tests are a bad idea:

This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great. The tests are perfect, but something can happen between the test where it’s good and then something happens and all of a sudden— She was tested very recently and tested negative and today I guess for some reason she tested positive.

Trump has said before that he’s not crazy about tests because all they do is make him look bad. Now he’s going further: he seems unsure the tests are even measuring something real. They’re negative one day and then positive the next. Why? “For some reason.”

I wonder how far down this rabbit hole he’s gone? Does Trump even believe the pandemic is real? He can’t see it, after all. Does he figure that if everyone would just stop reporting the numbers then everything would be OK? Or maybe he’s taking a purely transactional view: testing is fine in the abstract, but not so good when it tags someone close by who might be used to humiliate him. There’s no telling. But whatever it is, it’s pretty obvious that the stress of dealing with COVID-19 is accelerating whatever mental deterioration he was undergoing already.

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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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