Donald Trump was given a rude homecoming on Monday night as he returned to Trump Tower in New York City for the first time since his inauguration.
More than a thousand protesters were outside the president’s home as he arrived at around 9pm. Trump’s cavalcade was booed and people chanted “shame” as he began a two-day visit as part of a self-described “working vacation”.
Spurred on by events in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend, where a woman was killed and 19 injured during a white supremacist rally, and angered by the president’s lackluster response to the tragedy, people had lined the streets to the north and south of Trump’s home for more than four hours, chanting and waving signs.
Police erected hundreds of yards of metal barricades in an attempt to contain protesters, while a line of sanitation department trucks prevented access to the front of Trump Tower.
Earlier, as the president tweeted that he was “leaving for New York City”, the sidewalks outside his home were packed with protesters while shouts of “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA”, and “Not my president” echoed down Fifth Avenue.
Josh Friedman, a 23-year-old activist who had co-organized the protest, said Trump’s handling of the Charlottesville tragedy was a main focus.
Hundreds of white supremacists gathered in the Virginia city for a “unite the right” rally that saw angry clashes between rightwing rallies and counter-protesters.
“Even though Donald Trump is not per se the cause of that, he is related to that,” Friedman said, adding: “He really is enabling white nationalists, white surpremacists, the KKK, armed militias.”
The Charlottesville rally culminated with a driver ramming a car into a group of anti-rightwing protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was remembered by a number of the protesters.
While a number of people marched up and down outside Trump Tower, around 200 demonstrators, all dressed in black, gathered at the corner of Central Park for what they described as a “funeral march” to “mourn the death of Heather Heyer, and condemn the many ways Trump is killing our country”.
A group of people had brought a version of the inflatable rat more commonly seen at trade union protests. This particular inflatable saw Trump depicted as a rodent, with yellow hair, protruding teeth, a long red neck-tie and an orange tail protruding from the seat of its pants.
April Goehrke, a 33-year-old graduate student who lives in Manhattan, said she had been inspired to protest by the “events in Charlotte”.
“The fact people feel comfortable spouting that kind of hatred in America is appalling and we’re here to let people know that there’s others in America who won’t accept it,” Goehrke said.
Trump, who is currently on what he has called a “working vacation”, is due to spend two nights in his Trump Tower apartment. The building also served as the headquarters for Trump’s presidential transition team, and was the site of Donald Trump Jr’s meeting with a Russian lawyer who he believed was representing the Kremlin and had compromising information on Hillary Clinton.
Maribeth Whitehouse, a teacher from New Rochelle, New York, said she hoped the protest would “show what America stands for” after the events in Charlottesville.
Despite the impressive numbers, she was not hopeful the rally would change Trump’s ways.
“I wish I could say that it would result in a deep reflection into his soul,” Whitehouse said.
“But that’s a shallow pool and I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of reflection going on in that.”
