Aaron Sorkin wrote a powerful letter to his 15-year-old daughter, Roxy, and his ex-wife, Julia Sorkin, following Donald Trump’s presidential win. The Oscar-winning screenwriter’s note was published by Vanity Fair on Wednesday, November 9.
Sorkin, 55, first blasted the mogul, 70. “It’s hardly the first time my candidate didn’t win (in fact it’s the sixth time), but it is the first time that a thoroughly incompetent pig with dangerous ideas, a serious psychiatric disorder, no knowledge of the world and no curiosity to learn has,” he wrote to his family.
“And it wasn’t just Donald Trump who won last night — it was his supporters too. … Men who have no right to call themselves that and who think that women who aspire to more than looking hot are shrill, ugly and otherwise worthy of our scorn rather than our admiration struck a blow for misogynistic s–theads everywhere. Hate was given hope,” he wrote. “The battle isn’t over, it’s just begun. Grandpa fought in World War II and when he came home this country handed him an opportunity to make a great life for his family. I will not hand his granddaughter a country shaped by hateful and stupid men. Your tears last night woke me up, and I’ll never go to sleep on you again.”
The West Wing creator doesn’t want the women in his life to be discouraged. He reassured them that “a hundred million people in America and a billion more around the world” are just as disappointed in the outcome and that the fight isn’t over.
“The Trumpsters want to see people like us (Jewish, ‘coastal elites,’ educated, socially progressive, Hollywood …) sobbing and wailing and talking about moving to Canada. I won’t give them that and neither will you. Here’s what we’ll do … we’ll f–king fight. (Roxy, there’s a time for this kind of language and it’s now.) We’re not powerless and we’re not voiceless,” he wrote. “We get involved. We do what we can to fight injustice anywhere we see it — whether it’s writing a check or rolling up our sleeves. Our family is fairly insulated from the effects of a Trump presidency, so we fight for the families that aren’t. We fight for a woman to keep her right to choose. We fight for the First Amendment and we fight mostly for equality — not for a guarantee of equal outcomes, but for equal opportunities. … Our darkest days have always — always — been followed by our finest hours.”
Sorkin has been vocal about Trump before. Back in June, he told the Today show that the businessman was “dangerous,” while Hillary Clinton was a “sober-thinking person.” In September, some of his former West Wing colleagues — Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford and more — even campaigned for the former secretary of state, 69, in Ohio.
Read the rest of Sorkin’s letter here.