Mamaroneck's Siskind Continues Documenting The Trump Era

MAMARONECK, NY — Amy Siskind hasn’t had a day off since shortly after the 2016 presidential election. It’s of her own making because, she said in a recent interview, she’s writing the first draft of history. So far that “first draft” consists of The Weekly List, which is on the internet; a best-selling book, “The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year,” and most recently The Weekly List podcast.

Siskind is a former Wall Street executive and is president and co-founder of The New Agenda, a national organization working on issues of economic independence and advancement, gender representation and bias and campus sexual assault.

Shortly after the 2016 election, Siskind, a Mamaroneck resident, was inspired by a trip to Val-Kill, the Hudson Valley home of Eleanor Roosevelt.

The unapologetic Trump critic started writing things down — things that, to her, didn’t seem normal.

“I read up about authoritarian regimes,” Siskind said. “There were already concerns about Trump stoking hate during the campaign.”

People who studied authoritarians said things would “change slowly and subtly, so you wouldn’t notice it,” she said.

Writer Sarah Kendzior, who wrote the foreword to Siskind’s book, suggested that people write things down that they never would have believed could have happened before Trump took office.

So Siskind started writing down what she considered to be “not normal.”

“Everything in ’The List’ are things that are not normal to Democrat versus Republican,” she said.

The first week, Nov. 31-20, 2016, which was initially just shared on Facebook and Twitter, had nine items, including an uptick in acts of hate, cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the president-elect targeting “Saturday Night Live,” the New York Times and the musical “Hamilton” on Twitter.

Week 86, which is available on the internet or via the podcast, contains 164 “not normal” items, including more than 400,000 people participating in the Families Belong Together marches, dozens of reservists and recruits who enlisted in the military because they were promised a path to citizenship being discharged and eight members of Congress meeting in Moscow with Russian counterparts on Independence Day.

Why did she decide to add a podcast to her Trump-era responsibilities?

Siskind said it was a way for people to give themselves permission to take a week off from the news in the summer and get caught up Monday during their commute.

She agreed with an assessment by former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele that people feel like they have been waking up to a five-alarm fire every morning since Donald Trump won the election against Hillary Clinton.

“I think you do need to refresh yourself,” Siskind said, “but people can’t look away.”

The podcast also gives her a chance to put the items on the weekly list into more context.

Siskind said she painstakingly goes through news items to make certain they hold up to scrutiny, often relying on multiple sources.

“I’m super careful about what I include,” she said.

An example from Week 83 was the woman who stopped the border patrol from getting on a Greyhound bus to Las Vegas, because they were more than 100 miles from a border.

Siskind had heard about the woman on social media but waited until she had a reliable source before the incident made the Weekly List.

The book, published by Bloomsbury, covers the 52 weeks since the 2016 election, and Siskind continues to do appearances around the country promoting it.

She will be appearing at the Mamaroneck Public Library, 136 Prospect Ave. at 6 p.m. Wednesday, July 11. Call 914-630-5888 to reserve space. Siskind will also appear in Huntington, Long Island, at the Book Revue, at 7 p.m. Aug. 1.

Through her travels, Siskind has met people who told her she’s keeping them sane.

“The American people are being gaslighted,” she said. “What they are seeing and feeling is valid.

“The acceleration away from democracy is happening, and we could very well lose our democracy,” Siskind said.

Photo caption: Amy Siskind. Photo credit: Melanie Acevedo.