Like many Americans, Aaron Sorkin, had an emotional reaction to learning that Donald Trump won the presidential election.
Unlike many Americans, however, Sorkin took to expressing his emotions after hearing the results via a very public platform: an open, heartfelt letter to his 15-year-old daughter Roxy and his wife Julia in Vanity Fair.
The result is just as epic as one might expect from the man who brought us The West Wing and The Newsroom; in the emotional letter, he doesn’t mince his words to express the range of feelings he’s felt since hearing that Trump was president elect.
While Sorkin spends some of the letter lamenting the attitudes that have characterized the Trump campaign, the majority of his letter is spent looking to the future, in which he maps out a plan of action, which range from recognizing that others feel similarly to using checks and balances effectively.
“We’re not powerless and we’re not voiceless,” he writes. “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. We stand up.”
Sorkin ends the powerful letter by promising his daughter that he will ensure that by the time she votes for a presidential candidate, she won’t have “a country shaped by hateful and stupid men.”
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