BY CODY BROOKS | Thousands of demonstrators marched from Union Square to Trump Tower on Wednesday evening to protest the president-elect a day after the huge election upset.
The vast snake of protesters wound up Broadway and through Midtown, being redirected every so often by police barriers and vague shouts through bullhorns that obstructing traffic is illegal.
Along the way, though, a more positive bullhorn blared: all of the drivers in gridlocked cars and trucks and even in double-decker tourist buses who, in a stupefying antithesis of road rage, honked in solidarity as the “Voldemort is not my president” and “Ashamed to be an American” signs walked by.
The head of the snake reached Trump Tower, compacting together as hundreds of marchers holding signs chanted their anger at the gaudy edifice’s front doors. Large white city Department of Sanitation trucks that had parked in front acted as a barricade, with a heavy police detail.
The full body of the snake finally rolled in and the numbers became thousands. It was difficult to move. A few hapless tourists were caught amid the legions of protesters, looking for a way out while stuck hundreds of feet deep inside the fold.
The feeling of the evening was disbelief and immediacy, hoping that somehow Trump will be ousted from his new throne before he has the chance to do any damage.
“I’m not thinking of the next four years yet,” one protester said. “I’m hoping there’s something we can do now, like in the next couple weeks.”
Those in the crowd gave varying reasons as to why Trump clinched the presidency, such as simmering racism in the heartland or disenchantment with establishment politics.
“They got distracted by his emotional appeals to fear, and to anger,” Helana Darwin, a sociology Ph.D. student, said. “Those are very powerful emotions to mobilize, and Hillary didn’t have those same emotions driving her campaign. She had a campaign of hope — but anger and fear are much more pressing than hope.”
Similar large protests erupted in Oakland, Chicago, Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles. Students across the nation walked out of their classrooms in protest, then went and joined a protest. A large effigy of Donald Trump’s head was burned in front of Los Angeles’s City Hall.
Throughout the wet streets of a weeping Manhattan that developer-turned-politician Trump helped to build, a succinct chant echoed from his native turf: “We! Reject! The President-elect! We! Reject! The President-elect!”
