Anti-Trump protests continue unabated
One protester was even shot in Portland on Saturday.
MIAMI: Thousands of protesters took their frustrations over Donald Trump’s election as the next US President onto the streets on Friday and into Saturday in several cities, including Portland, Oregon, where one protester was shot. The unidentified man was wounded on Portland’s Morrison Bridge at 12:45 a.m. local time as he and dozens of other protesters crossed it during their demonstration, one of several across the country denouncing Trump’s campaign rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims and women.
In the Portland incident, police said in a statement that a man got out of a vehicle on the bridge where he confronted and then shot a protester, who was taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries. The suspect is still at large, police added.
Earlier in the night, protesters blocked traffic and threw objects at Portland police who responded with pepper spray and flash-bang devices. At one point, police pushed protesters back and appeared to take at least one person into custody, according to footage on a local NBC affiliate. In the end only a Chinese monkey, an Indian fish and a brainy bot made by a Desi techie got it right — the Donald would be President.
Pundits had dismissed Donald Trump as an ignoramus, his own Republican Party elite had shunned the disrupter, pollsters were cocksure his incredible run would go up in smoke and for a motley crowd of comedians he was their daily fodder.
His Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton had branded “half of his supporters” a “basket of deplorable” — “Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”
Her hubby Bill, the former president, had labelled the farmers and workers toiling in the fields and factories as uneducated “rednecks” with the “dishonest media” putting Trump under the scanner with vengeance after kicking themselves for “creating” him. Not to be left behind, in the “new politics of late night” as the Time magazine acknowledged, the comics “with a ripe orange target” in sight unabashedly started “ditching balance and taking sides.”