A second round of protests was planned across the United States yesterday, a day after thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of big cities after Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election.
An anti-Trump rally was planned at New York City’s Union Square Park for a second straight night and organisers urged demonstrators to join events in Washington DC, Baltimore, the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere.
There were protests in at least 10 cities on Wednesday, including one that filled streets in midtown Manhattan with demonstrators marching to Trump Tower, the president-elect’s gilded home on Fifth Avenue.
Many chanted “Not my president!” and blasted his campaign rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims and other groups.
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and a high-profile Trump supporter, said that the demonstrators were “a bunch of spoiled cry-babies”.
“If you’re looking at the real left-wing loonies on the campus, it’s the professors not the students,” Giuliani said on Fox News yesterday. “So these are the ones who are more influenced by the professors.”
He said he would encourage Trump to listen to these voices and tell them to wait a year.
“Calm down, things are not as bad as you think,” Giuliani said.
More demonstrations are planned heading into the weekend, according to organisers’ online posts.
One urged protesters to rally in Washington, DC, on Inauguration Day, January 20.
On Wednesday night, protests in Los Angeles and Oakland, California, each drew several thousand people.
More than a dozen people were arrested by Los Angeles police when demonstrators tried to block a major highway intersection, a local CBS affiliate reported.
The Oakland demonstrators also blocked traffic, threw objects at police and smashed store front windows.
Police responded by throwing chemical irritants at the protesters, according to a Reuters witness.
Protesters also gathered in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, late on Wednesday.
Some 1,800 people gathered outside the Trump International Hotel and Tower in downtown Chicago, shouting slogans including “No Trump! No KKK! No racist USA”.
There were no immediate reports of arrests or violence there.
“I’m just really terrified about what is happening in this country,” said Adriana Rizzo, 22, in Chicago, who was holding a sign that read: “Enjoy your rights while you can.”
In Seattle, police responded to a shooting with multiple victims near the scene of an anti-Trump protest.
Authorities said it was unrelated to the demonstration.
A Trump campaign representative did not respond to requests for comment on the protests.
Trump said in his victory speech that he would be president for all Americans, saying: “It is time for us to come together as one united people.”
Among the demonstrators earlier on Wednesday were hundreds of high school and college students who walked out of class in cities including Seattle, Phoenix and San Francisco’s Bay Area.
About 300 mostly Latino high school students marched to City Hall in Los Angeles where they chanted in Spanish “the people united will never be defeated”.
Some waved signs with slogans such as “Immigrants Make America Great”.
Many of those students were members of the “Dreamers” generation – children whose parents entered the United States with them illegally, school officials said, and who fear deportation under a Trump administration.