What I did to fight Trumpism this week

Every Friday I fight Trumpism. I start by donating to a cause that advocates for good. I then contact government representatives to urge them to either oppose or support policies I consider important.

This week I donated to the Trevor Project. This week, the Trump administration revoked federal guidance that protects transgender students from discrimination in public schools. The Trevor Project conducts training and outreach to assist suicide-prone LGTBQ youth. You can donate over here.

I also called Senator Johnny Isakson, member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions and asked that he urge the administration to enforce Title IX. Here’s the script I used:

“Hi there. My name is Simon Owens and I’m calling to urge Senator Isakson to put out a statement opposing the Trump administration’s rollback of protections for transgender students. Transgender students are some of the most vulnerable members of the student population and are prone to higher rates of suicide. Senator Isakson should urge the Trump administration to enforce Title IX and protect our children.”

Want to help fight Trumpism too?

Here are the steps you can follow:

1. Pick a day of the week as your Fight Trumpism Day. That way, you always have a day set aside so you have no excuses to put it off. At most you’ll need to devote an hour a week to fighting Trumpism. My day is Friday.
2. Create a spreadsheet with two tabs. The first tab is for your donations. The second is for contacting your representatives. For the donations tag, track the organization, the issue it stands for, the donation amount, and the date you donated. On the contact your representatives tab, track the issue you’re contacting about, the representative you’re contacting (often it’ll be your local representative or the head of a congressional committee), and the date you contacted them.
3. For every Fight Trumpism Day, make your donation and contact your representative and then record it in the spreadsheet. I’d say you should donate the same amount every week. Even if it’s only $10, it will add up to $2,000 by the end of Trump’s four years. You will have also contacted your representatives 200 times.
4. After you’ve done these things, post about it on social media (like I’m doing here) in order to inspire others. Let’s say we got 10,000 other people to do this who weren’t doing it before; that would mean $20 million in donations and 2 million phone calls to representatives during Trump’s term. That kind of impact would be yuuggee. Get to it!