My oldest daughter is in preschool. Her favorite activity is painting. Mostly, she paints dinosaurs and ocean creatures. This week, she painted an “underwater triceratops.” And then an “underwater tyrannosaur.” She brought them to school and showed her friends. Her teacher said the paintings were “very good.” I’m proud of her.

Sometimes she paints other things. She recently went through a big outer space phase. One day, she proudly came into our room and taped a picture on the wall. She said it was planets. “There’s Venus and Saturn and Jupiter,” she said.

I looked at the painting. I did not see Venus or Saturn or Jupiter. I saw Donald Trump wearing a purple jester’s hat. Seriously. Look at this. It’s such a good picture of Donald Trump wearing a purple jester’s hat, you can practically see the crimes he’s committing. I mean, sure, you have to use your imagination a little bit. But that is definitely the 45th president of the United States. And now it’s the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning.

Donald Trump

Orange man bad

My kid

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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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