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.

For this week’s donation I gave to Save the Children, an organization that provides crucial supplies and support to Syrian refugees. Donald Trump’s administration has drafted an executive order that would block Syrian refugees from entering the United States. This is an atrocious reversal of the longstanding agreement between Western nations that we have a duty to absorb refugees from war-torn nations. To donate to Save the Children, go here.

I also contacted the office of Rodney Frelinghuysen, Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, to urge him to reject Trump’s proposal to withdraw funding for the arts and public broadcasting. Here’s the language I used:

“Dear Congressman Frelinghuysen,

I’m writing this letter to urge you to reject Donald Trump’s proposals to defund programs like the National Endowment for the Arts and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. These programs not only provide important services for disadvantaged communities, but they make up an infinitesimally small portion of the federal budget.

If you do help in defunding these programs, I vow to donate to your opponents in future elections.

Sincerely, Simon Owens”

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!