By Gina Cherelus and Ian Simpson
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Police put up security fences around U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s new Washington hotel on Thursday and a line of concrete blocks shielded New York’s Trump Tower as students around the country staged a second day of protests over his election.
A day after thousands of people took to the streets in at least 10 U.S. cities from Boston to Berkeley, California, chanting “not my president” and “no Trump,” fresh protests were held in Texas to San Francisco.
A Trump campaign representative did not respond to requests for comment on the protests but Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and a high-profile Trump supporter, called the demonstrators “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 on Thursday. “Calm down, things are not as bad as you think.”
The protesters blasted Trump for campaign rhetoric critical of immigrants, Muslims and allegations of sexual abuse of women. More than 20 people were arrested for blocking or attempting to block highways in Los Angeles and Richmond, Virginia, early Thursday morning.
White House spokesman Joshua Earnest said Obama supported the demonstrators’ right to express themselves peacefully.
“We’ve got a carefully, constitutionally protected right to free speech,” Earnest told reporters. “The president believes that that is a right that should be protected. It is a right that should be exercised without violence.”
In San Francisco, more than 1,000 students walked out of classes on Thursday morning and marched through the city’s financial district carrying rainbow flags representing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, Mexican flags and signs decrying the president-elect.
Several hundred students at Texas State University in San Marcos took to the campus to protest Trump’s election, with many students saying they fear he will infringe the civil rights of minorities and the LGBT community.
“NOT MY PRESIDENT”
In New York’s Washington Square park, several hundred people gathered to protest Trump’s election. Three miles (5 km) to the north at the gilt Trump Tower, where Trump lives, 29-year-old Alex Conway stood holding a sign that read “not my president.”
“This sign is not to say he isn’t the president of the United States, but for two days I can use my emotion to be against this outcome and to express that he’s not mine,” said Conway, who works in the film industry. “The only thing I can hope for is that in four years I’m proved wrong.”
In Washington, a jogger shouted an expletive about Trump as he passed the Trump International Hotel on Thursday, just blocks from the White House, where the former reality TV star had his first meeting with President Barack Obama to discuss transition plans.
More anti-Trump demonstrations are planned heading into the weekend, according to organizers’ online posts. One urged protesters to rally in Washington, D.C., on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20.
Supporters of Trump, who surprised many in the political and media establishment with Tuesday’s win, urged calm and recommended that Americans wait to see how he performed as president.
The United States has seen waves of large-scale, sometimes violent protests in the past few years. Cities from Ferguson, Missouri, to Berkeley have been rocked by demonstrations following high-profile police killings of unarmed black men and teens. Those followed a wave of large-scale protest encampments, starting with the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York in 2011.
Trump said in his victory speech, which was delivered in a far calmer manner than he displayed in many campaign appearances, that he would be president for all Americans. Some of his most controversial campaign proposals, including the call to ban Muslims from entering the United States, had been removed from his campaign website by Thursday.
A spate of isolated attacks on women and members of minority groups by people wearing Trump hats or saying his name were reported by police and U.S. media.
A hijab-wearing female student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette was assaulted on Wednesday morning by a man wearing a white “Trump” hat, who knocked her to the ground and took her head scarf and wallet, university police said in a statement.
Reports also showed other cases in which Trump opponents lashed out violently against people carrying signs indicating they supported him.
(Reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York, Ian Simpson in Washington, Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas, and Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Bill Trott)
