PORTLAND — Rowdy protests continued for a second night in Portland as people around the country protested Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.
In Portland, police used tear gas and flash-bang grenades Friday to try to disperse the crowd after hundreds of people marched through the city, disrupting traffic and spray-painting graffiti. Authorities said “burning projectiles” were thrown at police, and vandalism and assault had taken place during the rally, which organizers had billed as peaceful earlier in the day.
In a Thursday night protest in Portland by about 4,000 people, masked anarchists marching with the otherwise peaceful protesters smashed store windows with baseball bats, among other acts of mayhem. The protest became a riot and ended with 25 arrests.
On Friday, one of the organizers of the anti-Trump protesters, Gregory McKelvey, 23, defended the protest.
“It was our aim to channel the shared frustration, fear and anger that is so alive among so many of us considering our future prospects into a unified front for peaceful change,” he said in statement.
He disavowed the rioters: “The violent actions that occurred last night had absolutely nothing to do with our group,” he said Friday.
In Olympia, more than 200 people carrying signs gathered on the steps of the Washington state Capitol. The group chanted “not my president” and “no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.”
In other parts of the country, there were spirited demonstrations on college campuses and peaceful marches along downtown streets.
Hundreds joined an afternoon “love rally” in Washington Square Park in Manhattan.
Leslie Holmes, 65, a website developer from Wilton, Conn., took an hourlong train ride to the demonstration — her first protest since the 1970s, when she hit the streets of San Francisco to oppose the Vietnam War.
She described herself as an armchair liberal but declared, “I’m not going to be armchair anymore.”
“I don’t want to live in a country where my friends aren’t included, and my friends are fearful, and my children are going to grow up in a world that’s frightening, and my granddaughters can look forward to being excluded from jobs and politics and fulfilling their potential, so I’m here for them,” she said.
Evening marches disrupted traffic in Miami and Atlanta.
Trump supporter Nicolas Quirico was traveling from South Beach to Miami. His car was among hundreds stopped when protesters blocked Interstate 395.
“Trump will be our president. There is no way around that, and the sooner people grasp that, the better off we will be,” he said. “There is a difference between a peaceful protest and standing in a major highway backing up traffic for 5 miles. This is wrong.”
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets across California after night fell, including in downtown Los Angeles, where more than 200 were arrested a night earlier. In Bakersfield, where Trump is far more popular than in most of the state, some held signs reading “Anti-Trump, Pro-USA.”
Small protests also took place in Detroit; Minneapolis; Kansas City, Mo.; and Iowa City.
