Xander Schultz, a 34-year-old self-described social justice entrepreneur, is launching a campaign on Friday, #DefeatbyTweet, designed to boot Donald Trump out of office.
You can join in, too. All you need is some spare change. Every time Trump tweets, your money goes toward the Justice Fund — a group of Black-led grassroots political organizations working in swing states to get people to vote. Trump will be notified via Twitter with the receipts. You can sign up here to pledge any amount of money you want to donate per tweet.
Trump tweets an average of 30 times a day, or 900 tweets per month, according to Schultz. If one million people donate two cents every tweet, $18 million will be donated to the Justice Fund every month. (That’s just $18 from donators monthly to help defeat Trump and funnel money into Black-led organizations.)
You can give more, or even less: “If you give one cent per tweet, it’s nine bucks per month. It’s doable for a lot of people,” says Schultz. People are automatically capped at 900 monthly donations multiplied by whatever amount they want to donate.
“Just in case Trump goes extra crazy one month and tweets 5,000 times,” Shultz said.
Influencers and celebrities like To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before‘s Noah Centineo and YouTuber Alfie Deyes have already signed on to amplify the initiative. Billionaire Mike Novogratz, Schultz’s boss at the investment firm Galaxy Investment Partners, has pledged $1 million, $500,000 of which has already been donated.
Schultz says the idea for #DefeatforTweet came about only three weeks ago. However, he’s been mulling over how to galvanize people to vote in the upcoming presidential election since November.
For the last few weeks, Schultz has been talking with Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, daily to brainstorm how to spread the word about this campaign. He’s also been in touch with Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, a Justice Fund organization.
“If you don’t like what’s happening, we should focus on getting Black communities as much political power as possible,” Schultz says about the inspiration behind #DefeatbyTweet. “We can tax this guy [Trump] who uses his platform to spread so much hate.”
Schultz doesn’t think #DefeatbyTweet will stop Trump from tweeting his hateful rhetoric (even after the election), but he hopes the campaign will live long past the Trump era.
“What’s really exciting to think about is, even if a fraction of the people [continue pledging money], we could provide unprecedented funding for Black-led political organizers between election cycles, not just two months [for example’s sake] before an election,” explains Schultz.