WASHINGTON — A new online petition to denounce GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump has garnered more than 7,000 signatures and is trending on Facebook — all in less than 24 hours.
The idea for the #StopHateDumpTrump campaign began in the apartment of Eve Ensler, the playwright who wrote The Vagina Monologues. It quickly earned the signatures of other famous names including Scandal star Kerry Washington and Academy Award-winning actress Jane Fonda, among others.
"People are looking for a way to express their outrage," Ensler told Mashable in a phone interview Thursday.
Ensler, who called Trump a "clown," added that she blames the media in part for Trump's rise. They've "normalized Trump's extremism" with wall-to-wall coverage of his campaign, she says.
One of the campaign's backers, New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly, expressed that view in a cartoon she tweeted alongside a link to the campaign.
Trump scares me. I drew some #cartoons, signed this petition. See here: https://t.co/DvNCUcPy6m #stophatedumptrump pic.twitter.com/mdEy50za8S— lizadonnelly (@lizadonnelly) January 21, 2016
"The idea of the [campaign] is for people to see they're not alone, to see there are many people feeling the same thing," Ensler said of the outrage over Trump's comments on immigrants, women and Muslims.
For now, the campaign just lives online as a way to channel frustration at Trump's rhetoric. But Ensler says she and her colleagues are looking at turning it into something more. "We have a whole bunch of people meeting on a series of actions," Ensler said.