Trump Wants a Substantive Defense, Dammit

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Our commander-in-chief is unhappy:

President Trump said he has encouraged his Republican allies to defend him on the substance of the impeachment probe, instead of focusing on criticizing the process, ahead of another week of scheduled testimony from administration officials.

Doesn’t Trump realize that the reason his allies are whining about process is because they have no defense to offer on substance? Maybe not. Maybe Trump is so delusional he actually believes that there’s some substantive defense of extorting a foreign country to smear a political rival.

Luckily for him, the rest of the Republican Party is smarter. They’ll stick to carping about the unfairness of the hearings and, in a pinch, claiming that Trump’s extortion of Ukraine is just a minor slap-on-the-wrist kind of thing, certainly nowhere near an impeachable offense.

How long will this work? If the modern Republican Party is as shameless as I think it is, forever. We’ll see.

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GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

1) If you value the journalism we do but haven’t pitched in over the last few months, please consider doing so now—we urgently need a lot of help to make up for lost ground.

2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

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