Street clashes in D.C. as Trump backers decry vote
WASHINGTON — Thousands of supporters of President Trump returned to Washington on Saturday for rallies to back his desperate efforts to subvert the election that he lost to Joe Biden.
Sporadic fights broke out between pro-Trump and anti-Trump demonstrators after sundown. WRC-TV reported that four people were taken to a hospital with stab wounds, and the Metropolitan Police Department told the station that 23 people had been arrested.
The gatherings of Trump loyalists were meant as a show of force two days before the electoral college meets to formally elect Biden as the 46th president.
Trump, whose term ends Jan. 20, has not conceded, but is clinging to unsubstantiated claims of fraud rejected by state and federal courts, and again Friday by the Supreme Court.
He tweeted Saturday morning in supposed surprise: “Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal. Didn’t know about this, but I’ll be seeing them! #MAGA.”
He left the White House later for the Army-Navy football game at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., and cheers went up as Marine One flew over a rally on the National Mall.
“That’s pretty cool,” said Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor whom Trump recently pardoned, speaking from the stage at the time. “Imagine just being able to jump in a helicopter and just go for a joy ride around Washington.”
At a pro-Trump rally in Washington a month ago, the president thrilled supporters when he passed by in his motorcade en route to his Virginia golf club.
That protest drew 10,000 to 15,000 people to the capital, and ended late in the evening with scattered clashes between Trump loyalists and local activists near Black Lives Matter Plaza and the White House.
On Saturday, police took more steps to keep the two sides apart, closing a wide swath of downtown to traffic and sealing off Black Lives Matter Plaza.
Saturday’s rallies, including one downtown in Freedom Plaza, were smaller than those on Nov. 14, but the Proud Boys, a far-right group known to incite street violence, had a larger presence.
The group saw its profile raised in September when Trump told it to “stand back and stand by.”
After Saturday’s rallies, downtown Washington devolved into crowds of hundreds of Proud Boys and the combined forces of antifascist or antifa activists and Black Lives Matter backers in an area flooded with police. As dusk fell, the groups faced off on opposite sides of a street, with lines of city police and federal Park Police, some in riot gear, keeping them separated.
A Proud Boys member yelled, “You cops can’t be everywhere!” before the group dispersed.
Antifa activists also were more organized this time, with their own bicycle corps forming walls of bikes to match those of the police.
Earlier, about 50 men wearing the Proud Boys’ signature black and yellow circled the perimeter of Black Lives Matter Plaza, where about 200 anti-Trump demonstrators were rallying.
The demonstrators, trying not to engage with hecklers, chanted slogans and sang “Jingle Bells.” One man talked back to onlookers, but others yelled, “Don’t interact!”
The so-called Jericho March on the National Mall was described as a prayer rally with speakers “praying for the walls of corruption and election fraud to fall down.”
Speakers at Freedom Plaza also pushed debunked claims of election fraud to a receptive audience.
Sylvia Huff, a demonstrator who came from Gloucester, Va., said the legal defeats hadn’t shaken her belief that Trump won the election. “I believe the courts were on the take, too,” she said.
The Supreme Court, where three of the nine justices were appointed by Trump, “was just afraid of a political backlash,” she said.
Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump advisor, urged the crowd not to give up even after the Supreme Court decision. He said he wanted to send Trump a video and held up his phone, cuing the crowd to chant, “Stop the steal.”
The rally organizers seemed intent on avoiding confrontations, telling demonstrators to avoid certain hotels and marking off parts of downtown Washington as “no-go zones.”