In 1970, I got a job working in the press room of Allard Lowenstein’s re-election campaign. The great peace candidate had lead the “Dump Johnson” movement and was highly regarded as a progressive Long Island Congressman, so much so that he was basically gerrymandered out of having any chance of winning re-election. In fact, despite his national reputation, he lost pretty handily to a non-entity named Norman Lent.
My job was to keep the Congressman’s press books. These were extensive scrapbooks of clippings, not just about Lowenstein but about national, state and local issues that were of interest to his constituents. The books were a great tool for attacking his opponent while formulating his own campaign.
I was thinking about those books a few weeks ago when I started placing a virtual mountain of articles on Donald Trump I had bookmarked and reading-listed into a folder. As a writer with an intense interest in what has been happening since the election and what might happen in the future, I knew how important those articles could be in my work, my discussions or just for my own knowledge, but they were pretty useless as they were, so when I had some time this weekend, I thought I would try to make sense of them.
Very quickly it became apparent how useful a project this was — and if I found the collection helpful, others might as well. That’s how www.thetrumpdump.org was born. It took three days to organize what I had into categories with cross-indexing and tagging. There are mistakes and the cataloguing still needs fine tuning, but since I’m an inveterate collector with a desperate need to feel useful in the resistance movement, I intend to go on and add to it every day, aggregating information from a dozen or so sources. I suppose one could do the same thing with some expert Googling, but while it will be a somewhat idiosyncratic collection, it will be nice to have it all on the same page, all nicely organized if I say so myself.
And if Al Lowenstein could Dump Johnson maybe the Trump Dump will help Dump Trump.
If you find the site useful (and I won’t be hurt if you don’t), I hope you’ll share the url with friends.