September 22, 2019

GOP Lawmakers Are Retiring in Droves. Trump Is Partly to Blame.

A Washington Post analysis looks details how the President has shaped his party.

President Donald Trump arrives at Lima Allen Airport to participate in a tour of Pratt Industries with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Sunday.Evan Vucci/AP

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Since Donald Trump took office in January 2017, Republican lawmakers have left the House of Representatives in droves. A Washington Post analysis found that 40 percent of the 241 Republicans who have been in office since January 2017 have departed or retired.

Forty-one have announced they wouldn’t seek reelection or left national politics altogether since Trump took office, more than the two dozen Democrats who left during Obama’s first term in office. But why? “The vast turnover is a reminder of just how much Trump has remade the GOP—and of the purge of those who dare to oppose him,” the Post reported.

Though many have publicly cited family as the reason, the Post reported that privately, there’s some frustration about the party’s future direction under Trump. “I think a lot of members are pretty nervous that Trump doesn’t win reelection. And then we’re in the minority and we have a Democrat in the White House,” a Republican leadership aide told the Post. “We’re in the wilderness right now, but if you lose the White House, then that is the extreme wilderness.”

Republican Rep. Paul Mitchell, who announced his retirement in July following Trump’s tweets telling Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, put it this way: 

“Did any member of this conference expect that their job would start out every morning trying to go through the list of what’s happening in tweets of the day? We’re not moving forward right now. We are simply thrashing around.”

Read the rest of the report here. 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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