PHOTO ESSAY BY DONNA ACETO | With President Donald Trump, back in New York for only the third time since taking office in January, set to deliver an address to the United Nations General Assembly the following day, hundreds of demonstrators affiliated with Rise and Resist protested inside Grand Central Terminal during rush hour on September 18.
The protest’s theme was opposition to white supremacy, an issue that Trump elevated to a raging national debate with his “many sides” reaction in assigning responsibility for last month’s racist and neo-Nazi marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, that led to the death of Heather Heyer, a counter-protester killed when an Ohio man with a history of pro-Nazi sympathies rammed his car into a crowd gathered to denounce the hate messages.
On its Facebook page, Rise and Resist, in highlighting white supremacist policies of the Trump administration, also pointed to Trump’s Muslim ban, his suspension of President Barack Obama’s DACA program that protected undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children from deportation, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ war on drugs and his mass incarceration policies, and tax reform proposals aimed at relief for the wealthiest Americans.
After demonstrating at Grand Central, the protesters marched to Times Square.
In his bombastic address at the UN on Tuesday, Trump threatened to “totally destroy North Korea” if the US or its allies are threatened and called Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement “an embarrassment” to America.” — Additional reporting by Paul Schindler
