Did the Ides of Trump Hit a Million?
Organizer Zack Kushner Estimates It Did
“This is about someone dangerous being in charge of the U.S.,” said Zack Kushner, who brought the world the first Ides of Trump this past Wednesday. His deeply felt call to action was written on a keyboard saturated in wit, and it proposed that March 15 was the perfect day to “bury the White House post office in pink slips, all informing the President that he’s fired!” Once exposed to the outside world via Facebook, the call fired up a response from a lowball estimate of 97,000 people and an untold number of shares. How many sent their own postcards to the White House is unknown as yet — Kushner’s partner-in-crime Ted Sullivan sent 500 — but Kushner estimates it was “roughly” a million. In Santa Barbara, postal workers chuckled as they handed over Wonder Woman stamps and remarked that they’d sold a lot of postcards on Wednesday.
The idea was born after an hour-long wait for a train to the Women’s March in Oakland, Kushner said. That and a migraine headache, a lost boot, and dealing with a stroller in the dense crowd made him wonder, “What about the elderly and disabled people who really want their voice to be heard? Wouldn’t it be great if there were some tangible way to be heard with the same creativity and snarkiness and passion as the signs and the outfits at the march?”
He wrote the copy — “If I have a skill, that’s my skill,” he said — and sent it around to a few friends for ideas: “I’m not a political activist.” But one of his friends didn’t notice the fine print and sent it around to a bunch more friends, and it “just took off,” Kushner said. It landed a website with the help of another volunteer, Jennifer Jones. “I was so busy moderating the Facebook page,” he confessed, “I almost forgot to write any postcards.”
Will the White House give a count on the number of postcards the president receives from the Ides of Trump? Don’t hold your breath. “But we have some hope,” Kushner said, “that a friendly intern or someone in the postal system might snap a photograph and get it online.”
