Amy Siskind lists the changes under President Donald Trump; now it's a book

Donald Trump has Amy Siskind screaming in her sleep.

When she cracked a tooth last year, she blamed the stress of keeping a weekly list of all the things changing in Trump’s America.

The way she tells it, her endodontist diagnosed the cause right away.

“This is what happens in dictatorships,” the endodontist said, according to Siskind.

She has been wearing a mouth guard since that appointment, almost 50 weeks — and 50 lists — after Trump won the 2016 election.

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The Mamaroneck resident writes “The Weekly List,” compiling what she believes are societal norms turned on their head under the administration. On Tuesday, the first 52 weeks were released as a book, “The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year.”

The list has become nearly a full-time job without vacation days. Siskind is a former Wall Street executive and the co-founder of The New Agenda, a national women’s advocacy organization.

She never saw this coming.

“I had a life before this,” Siskind said with a laugh during a February interview at The Journal News/lohud, her first promoting the book. “I had plans for what came next when Hillary won. None of it had anything to do with this.”

Siskind is an unabashed Trump critic who says the country is creeping toward authoritarianism as the administration works to “dismantle” the U.S. government.

Each installment of the list begins the same: “Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you’ll remember.”

Look at the list week to week and it shows a subtle creeping toward authoritarian impulses, Siskind said, but look at it over the course of the first year and it’s an outline of profound political upheaval.

“The experts I read that were experts in authoritarians that encouraged me to do this list had said it would be like you were a frog in boiling water, that you wouldn’t notice degree by degree that you were coming to boil,” Siskind said.

She wrote the first list the week after Trump’s election, when she visited Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s former retreat that’s a historical site in Hyde Park, New York. She was looking for guidance, inspiration and asking herself, “What would Eleanor do?”

The early lists were crude and meant to be shared with her friends on Facebook and Twitter. The audience grew quickly. Her ninth week's post went viral, with more than 2 million views, she said.

She started adding links and streamlining the look and format. Soon, she was getting media attention from The Washington Post and other national outlets. She has a quarter of a million Twitter followers today.

As the audience got larger, so did the list.

Week One listed nine items. Week Two had 18. There were 36 items by January 2017, when Trump was inaugurated and the women’s march was held. There were as many as 120 items by the end of the year and 154 by Week 71, the latest list online.

An entry from Week Three says: “Trump tweeted his apparent displeasure with the ratings of Celebrity Apprentice under Arnold Schwarzenegger, saying he got ‘swamped’ compared with when Trump hosted the show.”

Week 40 says: “Reversing himself for the fourth time in four days, Trump said, ‘I think there’s blame on both sides’ — insinuating that the ‘alt-left’ was just as much to blame as white supremacists and neo-Nazis.”

Another, from Week 45, says: “Trump also said of Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem at football games in the 2016 season in protest against American racism, that NFL owners should respond by saying, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field.’”

The time commitment grew from a few hours each week to 20 hours by summer of last year, to more than 30 hours a week by the end of the first year.

“I’m always looking at my phone and I haven’t stopped since November 2016,” Siskind said. “I haven’t taken a day away from my phone because I can’t. I have to keep up with what he’s doing and the velocity of it has increased.”

Jackson Bayer, Siskind’s 17-year-old son, said last May he and his mother attended a forum at the library of a college he was visiting and looking to attend. He said she kept going back and forth to a computer to tweak the format of that week’s list.

“I thought it was really funny,” he said in a phone interview. “People in the library were looking around like, ‘What is this lady doing?’”

His mother keeps her sense of humor with him and his 20-year-old sister and two dogs, Bayer said. He said her focus on the list ramps up each week as she gets closer to posting on Saturdays. Fridays and Saturdays are stay-home nights, and Bayer is often picking up dinner, he said.

Bayer worked to organize a walkout protesting gun violence at Mamaroneck High School, where he’s a senior. He says his mother’s work has had an influence, with a home culture that encouraged him to take action when he sees something wrong in society.

Siskind said her own upbringing led to a sense of responsibility that keeps her dedicated to maintaining the list. With a Jewish background, the horrors of the Holocaust were “branded in her mind” from an early age by her parents and her teachers in Hebrew school.

She said she warns her social media followers and friends against complacency when even one group is marginalized. She used immigrants and the adminstration as an example.

“That’s just the appetizer,” she said. “He’s gone after everybody in certain ways except for straight, white Christian males but it’s escalating.”

Following are some highlights from our sit-down with Siskind, edited for clarity and length.

What exactly do you feel we’ve lost over the last year and change?

Most of what Trump does, if you look at it, it’s within two categories. One is his desire to stay in power and the other is to make money.

The most important thing for him to do is consolidate power and to keep his base excited. And to keep his base excited, we have seen a nonstop attack on marginalized communities and women, week after week. Immigrants, immigrant roundups, the NFL knee excuse to incite his base, to what’s going on with the Muslim ban, with the transgender military ban. Those are all things to excite his base and keep them in power.

Is there Trump hysteria out there?

I think our country has changed and it’s been a subtle change. When I started doing this list, hysteria was thrown around a lot at people like me who called out authoritarian movements early on and now that’s kind of mainstream. I think our country has come to the awareness that there’s a real issue.

There’s something going on that nobody in our lifetime, or in the lifetime of our country, has experienced. So, in answer to your question, I think the further we get away the more we realize how much we’re losing.

Is there anything that you can say that has come out of the presidency that you think is positive?

He started the most exciting wave of feminism I’ve seen in my life and Lord knows we’ve been trying. So In terms of him doing things, no, but in terms of him reminding us of things we haven’t gotten done as a country.

I think he’s galvanized our country and united it in unexpected ways and drawn a contrast to a lot of issues, gun control most recently.

What did Trump specifically do to get that reaction?

I think he’s wakened people up from a comfort slumber that things in our country were OK and things that we have always taken for granted.

What’s been normalized that has surprised you the most?

The book goes to week 52, so through November 2017…and Trump still has yet to acknowledge that Russia interfered in our election. So why is that? And why isn’t he being held to account? I believed that there were checks and balances in the system and I thought the Republicans — there would be a lot of John McCains — would stand up and say our country is at risk. Initially there were and then a lot of them backed off.

The immediacy of the list seemed very conducive to the internet. Does it work as a book?

It’s a journey as a book. I had to reread it in order as I was editing it and whatnot. It’s sort of been a journey for what we’ve lost I guess is the best way to put it.

How long do you keep doing this?

The answer is until he’s gone.

I’m committed to be the citizen activist to write this all down, because if I don’t it’s not going to be written.

Why do you feel you need to be the person to do it?

Because if I don’t, nobody else will. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t put up with this.

Believe me, there’s a gazillion other things I would rather be doing with my life than this but I’m here and I’m going to stick with it until he’s out of office.

Is there a numbing effect with all of the news coming out?

Yes and every day I feel like I’m screaming in my head. I think it’s really hard for people to take it all in and not scream inside their heads.

For more information on the list or the book, visit theweeklylist.org.

Follow Mark Lungariello on Facebook: @lungariello; and Twitter: @marklungariello.