As President Donald Trump arrived in Hawaii on Friday for a short one-day stop ahead of his five-country Asia trip, hundreds of protesters—along with the local news media—made sure to treat him with a distinctly unwarm welcome.
"When I first found out he was coming here, my reaction was a physical one, like you touch something sticky and slimy."
—Gaye Chan, University of Hawaii
"Wish you weren't here," read the front page of West Hawaii Today ahead of Trump's arrival.
"I have no aloha for him and I don't think the state of Hawaii does either," added a local resident.
Hawaiians also sent around postcards and fliers depicting the score, "Hawaii 3, Trump 0"—a reference to the state judiciary's smackdowns of Trump's Muslim ban.
"When I first found out he was coming here, my reaction was a physical one, like you touch something sticky and slimy," Gaye Chan, an art professor at the University of Hawaii who founded the anti-Trump coalition Hawaii J20+, told the Los Angeles Times. "Most of what his administration is doing just feels so wrong to us. He's harming the environment, he's harming LGBTQ people, he's insulting races and ethnicities for us in a state where the majority of us are not white."
As Jaweed Kaleem of the Los Angeles Times notes, it is hardly surprising that Trump was greeted with protests, given that only 30 percent of voters backed him in the 2016 election—the lowest percentage of any state.
Kaleem also highlights the fact that Trump "led the 'birther' movement that sowed doubt that Obama was born [in Hawaii]."
Protestors were sure to invoke Trump's role in peddling the falsehood that Obama was not born in the United States as he arrived in Honolulu on Friday.
Hawaii trump protestor troll game is 200% pic.twitter.com/l3oA1wfYrH
— ALT-Immigration (@ALT_uscis) November 4, 2017
