San Francisco’s Trump Protest Sums Up Election 2016 in One Flaming Piñata
DONALD TRUMP’S LATEST visit to California was met with an hours-long protest in front of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Burlingame, twenty minutes south of San Francisco, the site of the state Republican Convention.
More than a hundred rowdy protesters blocked the entrance to the hotel, where Trump was scheduled to give a speech to conservative activists. They beat on drums, danced, chanted. They wore full-body costumes, including
masks or bandannas, and brandished Donald Trump mascots. They waved signs. They wrapped themselves in Mexican flags.
Naturally, the press was there to cover the show too, mingling with protesters in one of the most progressive pockets of the nation. And in 2016, that means not just the full-on local news crews with 3-pound video cameras. Among the livid crowd shouting “No hate in our state!” and “Donald Trump, get out of the bay—immigrant rights are here to stay,” were BuzzFeed reporters, using a phone to broadcast the protest to Facebook Live. They kept it up for nearly two hours, garnering thousands of reactions and hundreds of shares.
The San Francisco protest was quite the scene, but not a new one. Such is the state of the national election today: Old and new media fully coexist and cross boundaries. No cable? No matter. It’s likely your feeds are clogged with all this live content anyway. Even a USA Today reporter used her phone to Periscope—in between taking notes for a newspaper story.
I Snapchatted the topless protestors and those that set fire to a Trump piñata. I tweeted prolifically. For extra info, I obsessively checked social media.
From the looks of it, that’s what everyone around me was doing, too. When social media informed the crowd Trump had snuck into the hotel through the back, protestors migrated to try to block his exit. (He seemed to evade them, though.) And they stayed hours after his noon speech, continuing to shout their protests.
Around half past two, when the police finally told the throng to disperse, they reluctantly did so, but not before one protester, standing on a barricade, yelled triumphantly through a megaphone: “Trump had to come through the back, but we’re leaving in the front.”
DONALD TRUMP’S LATEST visit to California was met with an hours-long protest in front of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Burlingame, twenty minutes south of San Francisco, the site of the state Republican Convention.
More than a hundred rowdy protesters blocked the entrance to the hotel, where Trump was scheduled to give a speech to conservative activists. They beat on drums, danced, chanted. They wore full-body costumes, including
masks or bandannas, and brandished Donald Trump mascots. They waved signs. They wrapped themselves in Mexican flags.
Naturally, the press was there to cover the show too, mingling with protesters in one of the most progressive pockets of the nation. And in 2016, that means not just the full-on local news crews with 3-pound video cameras. Among the livid crowd shouting “No hate in our state!” and “Donald Trump, get out of the bay—immigrant rights are here to stay,” were BuzzFeed reporters, using a phone to broadcast the protest to Facebook Live. They kept it up for nearly two hours, garnering thousands of reactions and hundreds of shares.
The San Francisco protest was quite the scene, but not a new one. Such is the state of the national election today: Old and new media fully coexist and cross boundaries. No cable? No matter. It’s likely your feeds are clogged with all this live content anyway. Even a USA Today reporter used her phone to Periscope—in between taking notes for a newspaper story.
I Snapchatted the topless protestors and those that set fire to a Trump piñata. I tweeted prolifically. For extra info, I obsessively checked social media.
From the looks of it, that’s what everyone around me was doing, too. When social media informed the crowd Trump had snuck into the hotel through the back, protestors migrated to try to block his exit. (He seemed to evade them, though.) And they stayed hours after his noon speech, continuing to shout their protests.
Around half past two, when the police finally told the throng to disperse, they reluctantly did so, but not before one protester, standing on a barricade, yelled triumphantly through a megaphone: “Trump had to come through the back, but we’re leaving in the front.”
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