Tens of thousands of Americans are planning further protests and acts of dissent against the election of Donald Trump, after a second night of action in cities across the US that followed a wave of demonstrations on Wednesday in which dozens were arrested.
Hundreds took to the streets on Thursday in Denver, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Portland, Oakland, and dozens more US cities, as well as Vancouver, Canada. The protests – smaller and more muted than Wednesday’s actions – were for the most part peaceful and orderly, though there were scattered acts of civil disobedience and damage to property.
Protesters threw objects at police in Portland and damaged a car dealership, the Portland police department said, declaring the demonstration a riot. Some protesters sprayed graffiti on cars and buildings and smashed storefront windows, local media reported. A handful of people were arrested, a witness told Reuters.
In Minneapolis, dozens of people marched on to Interstate 94, blocking traffic in both directions for at least an hour as police stood by. A smaller band of demonstrators briefly halted traffic on a busy Los Angeles highway before police cleared them off.
Baltimore police reported that about 600 people marched through the Inner Harbor area, with some blocking roadways by sitting in the street. Two people were arrested, police said. One of the largest demonstrations was in Denver, where a crowd estimated to number about 3,000 gathered on the grounds of the Colorado state capitol and marched through the city centre:
Earlier in the day, Trump was accorded a chilly but deferential welcome at the White House when he met Barack Obama for a 90-minute private meeting in the Oval Office.
In the first stage of a 72-day transition process between Tuesday’s unexpected election victory and Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, Obama said the two men discussed “foreign and domestic policy” and how to ensure the handover of power went smoothly.
Washington has quickly adopted a deferential approach toward the future commander-in-chief, despite the demonstrations that have taken place since Tuesday’s election and reports of an increase in racist attacks aimed at immigrants.
Protest organizers and activists across the country are debating their next moves amid some calls for more direct action.
“It’s time to begin training our young people in nonviolent civil disobedience again,” said Benjamin Jealous, the former head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). “Turning anger into power takes discipline and focus.”
A private Facebook group planning a protest march on Washington had gathered 30,000 members by Thursday afternoon, with thousands joining every hour. Trish Gilbert, the creator of the group, said the march would be a “peaceful style show of force” against Trump’s most extreme policies.
“We’ll show all of them – the House, the Senate and the president-elect, because he really is going to be president – that we are still here, and we are not going to forget what happened, and they’d better not mess with what we have achieved,” said Gilbert.
Hundreds of thousands of people signed a petition on Change.org pleading with the state electors who formally select the president to deliver the office to Hillary Clinton.
The protests were dismissed as irrelevant by Trump’s advisers. Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is being touted as a likely attorney general in Trump’s administration, called demonstrators “a bunch of spoiled crybabies”.
“Give me a year and I think you are going to find you are living in a much better country than you are living in right now,” Giuliani said on Fox News.
Earlier in the day, high school students staged walkouts across the country. Authorities in Los Angeles told the LA Times that at least 4,000 students from the LA County school system had walked out in protest by Thursday afternoon.
Hundreds of high school students in San Francisco walked out of class too, and took to the streets of downtown, shouting “Not my president”, “My body, my choice” and “Love trumps hate” as they marched in the middle of traffic.
Malkia Williams, 15, who carried a sign that said “Pussy grabs back” – a reference to a leaked recording where Trump bragged he could sexually assault women because of his fame – said it was important for students to speak out since they could not vote.
“A lot of adults voted for Donald Trump and they think we don’t care, but we do,” she said as she marched down a busy downtown street where student activists were temporarily halting vehicles, with many honking in support. “My loved ones and friends could be taken out of this country.”
Williams said she was still processing Trump’s victory. “I still don’t feel it’s real. This is not the future we want,” she said.
In Oakland, where 30 people were arrested on Wednesday night, a crowd gathered on Thursday but the protests were more subdued than the previous evening, when a series of small fires were set, some windows were smashed and a few people threw rocks at police.
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, according to a local ABC affiliate station, WISN 12, a number which later swelled to over 2,000 as the group marched downtown, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
Lewis & Clark College student Gregory McKelvey, who organised a protest in Portland on Thursday, told local NBC affiliate KGW: “We think that because Trump is president, it becomes even more urgent for our city to become what people want it to be. It’s an anti-Trump protest but also a call for change in our city because we need to push for progress here.”
Elsewhere on Thursday, hundreds protested in Salt Lake City, Utah; San Francisco; Houston, Texas; and in Washington DC, where about 100 protesters marched from the White House to Donald Trump’s newly opened hotel several blocks away.
At least 200 people rallied there after dark, many of them chanting “No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” and carrying signs with such slogans as “Impeach Trump” and “Not my president.”
“I can’t support someone who supports so much bigotry and hatred. It’s heart-breaking,” said 25-year-old Joe Daniels from Virginia.
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