On Friday night, President Donald Trump was hamming it up before supporters from the deep-red shelter of an Alabama venue. But hours before his arrival, AL.com reports hundreds of angry residents and students at the University of Southern Abama were hounding the president for daring to show his face.
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Maura Mandyck, an organizer with Indivisible Mobile, reporters that she was proud of the young people in the crowd for standing up against Trump.
“Those who will gather in the Mitchell Center tonight, the con men, the crooks, the enablers, and the blind followers, they know in their racist old bones that their time is coming to an end,” said Mandyck. “It is our time now. Even more so, it is your time now.”
Demonstrators blasted Trump as a “felon” and a “war criminal” in front of his supporters while several shouted back against the student protestors, according to AL.com.
“The crowd proceeded to march across campus chanting statements like ‘no Trump, no KKK, no fascists in the USA’ before stopping a few yards from the line of Trump supporters, who exchanged shouts and anger.
Madison Rolader, a junior and President of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, said she and others were blasting Trump on campus because they were “disgusted that Trump was welcomed to the school and condemned University of South Alabama President Jo Bonner.”
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Rolader said the protest coalesced around arguments that Trump represents the “billionaire class” rather than regular voters.
“We want to show them that we, the people, are tired,” Rolader told AL.com. “We’re angry, and we’re not going to have this. We’re upset. We are begging people in Congress to … do something about the ruins of the checks and balance [system] in our government right now, and they’re not. So, it’s our it’s our job as the people to use our voice before it’s too late and use it all together.”
The president, who is now a billionaire himself, is generating more than $1 billion a year in cryptocurrency ventures alone since siding with the crypto industry early in his second term. And Democrats are already talking of hitting the Trump family’s business interests with a series of congressional investigations next year if they win control of the House.
The protests raged on Friday despite critics claiming Trump only picked Alabama because of the state’s crimson-red political alignment and its appeal as a safe bastion of support at a time of collapsing presidential approval.
“Trump took a silver platter that the American people gave him to run with this economy. And many people believe that he has run it into the ground, instead, in a short two-year time period,” said former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson. “And why he’s in Alabama tonight is because he’s welcome in Alabama. There’s a ton of red states where he might face boos right now. So that’s why he’s not going there to those places.”
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