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.
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