Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and The Newsroom, wrote a letter to his daughter, Roxy, and his wife, Julia, after Donald Trump's shocking victory in the election Tuesday night. In the letter, published in full in Vanity Fair, the screenwriter wrote about standing up and fighting even after a crushing defeat.
"America didn’t stop being America last night and we didn’t stop being Americans and here’s the thing about Americans: Our darkest days have always — always — been followed by our finest hours."
Sorkin started the letter with the same kind of stunned grief that radiated through the mostly pro-Clinton Hollywood since Tuesday.
"For the next four years, the President of the United States, the same office held by Washington and Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, F.D.R., J.F.K. and Barack Obama, will be held by a man-boy who’ll spend his hours exacting Twitter vengeance against all who criticize him (and those numbers will be legion)," he wrote. "We’ve embarrassed ourselves in front of our children and the world."
What, Sorkin asked, does his family do now?
"First of all, we remember that we’re not alone," he wrote. "A hundred million people in America and a billion more around the world feel exactly the same way we do. ... We’ll (expletive) fight. (Roxy, there’s a time for this kind of language and it’s now.) We’re not powerless and we’re not voiceless."
Sorkin finished the letter by noting that 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."
Read the full letter at Vanity Fair.
Read the moving letter Aaron Sorkin wrote his daughter after Donald Trump was elected president https://t.co/oLYctikfg2 pic.twitter.com/UIOTrlBvFn
— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) November 10, 2016