Most of the world has spent the past week in various kinds of outrage as the Trump administration has repeatedly lied to the public, waged war against the press, and put in gear a slate of retroactive policies that even the people who supported him thought were not actual proposals. In a development everyone agrees is fucked, they have also quietly stopped accepting petitions, a sign that they will continue chugging along no matter what you think. And so, along with that outrage, there have been exhortations to express it productively: to protest if able, to donate if able, and to contact one’s congressional representatives, when and if able. The last of these requires a bit of know-how, but a slate of tools have streamlined it.
5 Calls puts a lot of different sources together, providing not only phone numbers for your specific representatives but also updated scripts on a host of issues ranging from Cabinet confirmations to the construction of the border wall, which is helpful if you are a person who doesn’t like talking to other people on the phone or if previous attempts have resulted in you calling them a pig-fuck and then sheepishly hanging up.
While that’s worth doing, A.V. Club commenter Nate The Great reports that these phone numbers are typically so flooded with calls that many congressmen and women have turned them off. So why not fax those fuckers? You do not need a fax machine. Nate suggests FaxZero, a free service that contains tiny links at the top of the page to automatically contact senators and representatives. You can do it up to three times a day for free, which means two faxes for the issues most important to you and one to just say, “For fuck’s sake, you guys. For fuck’s sake.”
While those fax machines may, at this point, be funneling directly into a recycling bin as the entire population of Earth calls out to Washington in a symphony of despair at its own impending apocalypse, a third option exists: contacting Trump directly at his for-profit businesses. White House Inc. convincingly argues that Trump’s many international business interests function as satellite White Houses, and so set up an automated system that actually calls your cellphone and connects you to an invariably beleaguered switchboard operator for a Trump property. Treat them kindly, but let them know what’s on your mind. At this point, they are the closest thing we have to a representative to the president.
After all that is done, go tell the president to eat shit on Twitter. He’s probably reading it.
