January 11, 2018

Trump: We Need to Keep Out People From “Shithole Countries”

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I’m back from lunch. It’s a nice day, so I walked. There was a lovely egret in our storm channel that I’d like to get a picture of someday. So did anything happen while I was go—

President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they floated restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to two people briefed on the meeting. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met Wednesday.

That’s from the Washington Post. Apparently the White House isn’t denying that Trump said this, which prompted the following from CNN’s White House correspondent, Jim Acosta:

What we have to come to grips with—and I almost have to think back to the day when we were at Trump Tower when the president was commenting on Charlottesville, and he was saying there were very fine people on both sides, saying there were very fine people among the white supremacists and the Nazis—is that the president of the United States just seems to have a problem here, Wolf, in this area. And we can tiptoe around it, we can dance around it and not really put our finger on it, but the president seems to harbor racist feelings about people of color from other parts of the world.

This statement from Trump, Acosta said, “cuts to the very core of who he is.”

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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.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

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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