Trump succeeds where Obama failed – spawning a new wave of liberal activism
The night Hillary Clinton lost the White House, Amanda Litman cried so hard she threw up.
In Atlanta, as the returns rolled in, Traci Feit Love faced a question from her anguished 8-year-old daughter: “Now what do we do?”
Across the country, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Rita Bosworth wondered the same thing.
The three never met, never spoke, never communicated in any fashion. But in the days and weeks that followed, they became common threads in a sprawling patchwork: the angry and politically aggrieved who — with no help from politicians, political parties or any formal campaign structure — have joined to fight President Trump and his policies.
From her Brooklyn apartment, the 27-year-old Litman co-founded a group called Run For Something, which encourages people under age 35 to do just that. Thousands have signed up, many of them political novices.
Love, a 40-year-old attorney, took to Facebook and virtually overnight created Lawyers for Good Government, now a coast-to-coast army of legal experts battling Trump on issues such as immigration and a ban on travelers from six Muslim-majority countries.
Bosworth, 38, helped start a network that steers donors and activists in Democratic-leaning states like California toward legislative contests in more Republican redoubts, on the theory that their actions can have a greater impact where resources are scarce.
The “idea is to build a pipeline of candidates and create incubators for policy that can eventually take the national stage,” said Bosworth, who plans to leave her job as a San Jose public defender soon to work full time for her organization, the Sister District Project (as in “sister cities”).