The celebrations that broke out on the streets of the president’s home town of New York City sent a loud message to the former star of The Apprentice: “You’re fired.”
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Some shouted his old catchphrase from the show as hundreds gathered spontaneously outside the Trump Tower skyscraper on the glittering island of Manhattan.
This was where the brash real estate mogul had ruled a roost of sorts, as the chippy property scion from the outer borough of Queens who inherited, borrowed and bullied his way to fame and fortune – with a reputation for stiffing contractors, courting the media like a celebrity, and swaggering around like a mob boss.
Trump Tower was also where he had descended, riding his ostentatious golden escalator, to announce his 2016 bid to become president.
And it was also where he boasted during that campaign that he could literally shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn’t lose any votes – but his luck had run out on Saturday as news broke he would be a one-term president.
Uptown in the majority Black neighborhood of Harlem, they were even less polite than the gloating cries of “You’re fired” in midtown. “Fuck you, Donald Trump,” a crowd chanted, over and over, at a pop-up demonstration that closed a short stretch of Broadway, while the police looked on without making attempts to stop the outpouring of emotion.
The crowd danced, cheered, sprayed champagne, honked horns and, of course, took selfies and video clips.
As soon as the news had broken mid-morning, the neighborhood erupted in cheering and the kind of banging of pots and pans that echoes for blocks, and was most recently heard every Thursday evening to honor healthcare workers in the pandemic.
Joanna Walters
(@Joannawalters13)
November 7 2020 in New York pic.twitter.com/C9bB687uw8
November 7, 2020
Alan Mingo, a Broadway and film actor who has lived in the Sugar Hill part of Harlem for 17 years, had tears in his eyes as he strode along frantically texting with friends.
“Seeing this euphoria, this jubilation, it’s incredible,” he said.
He said he was shaken out of half-sleep by the eruption on the streets and passed people exclaiming how their vote had mattered. As a Black gay man, he said that Donald Trump inflicted pain “on Black and brown people, not just with his rhetoric, but when he started separating children [from their parents as they migrated across the US-Mexico border] that had echoes of so many bad things from our history”.
He added that he was very proud that Kamala Harris would become the first female vice-president.
Moments later, Chase Rivera came pedaling up the street on a Citi Bike at top speed, dinging its bell and whooping loudly to no one and everyone. He skidded to a halt when the Guardian flagged him down and, sweating in the late fall sunshine into his Black Lives Matter T-shirt, the 25-year-old said: “We were on our way to a dictatorship [with Trump].”
He added: “This is the happiest I’ve seen people in 2020.”
A native New Yorker, Rivera said he was a laboratory scientist and looked forward to a president who once again respected science. “Let’s hear it for science,” he said. “Biden and Harris have already spoken on the coronavirus and we need to get to grips with it. Then I’m very excited for the Green New Deal, and that we will be part of the Paris climate accord again and take action on the climate crisis.”
New York City had voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden, with the exception of the more conservative, working-class borough of Staten Island, just beyond the Statue of Liberty, which stuck with Trump.
Back downtown in Manhattan, near Trump Tower, among those cheering Biden’s win was a man holding what appeared to be a hastily prepared “You’re fired” sign, and another man in a rainbow outfit and shaggy blond wig danced to the Wizard of Oz song Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead.
Always busy with traffic – except at the height of the pandemic lockdown in the city in March and April – Fifth Avenue had erupted with hollering and drivers honking their horns and flashing their headlights, some with Stars and Stripes flags sticking out of the window.
Colette Poncet, a New York University student and one of the many who poured on to the street near Trump Tower, had been sleeping late and woke to news that Biden had won. “I screamed and I woke my roommate up,” said Poncet, who voted for the first time in this election. Poncet described the news as a “big relief” and was “also very excited. Hope is restored.”
Poncet was also excited about Harris’s win as vice-president-elect. “It’s amazing, as a woman, Hillary Clinton was the closest you ever came, and she didn’t win,” she said. “Maybe it’s not the full progress, but it’s very empowering.”
The New York City native also said: ‘“I’ve never seen it this alive, and I’ve lived here my entire life.”
The headline in the Queens Daily Eagle in Trump’s childhood borough, where his early childhood was spent in a modest, mock-Tudor home in the suburban Jamaica neighborhood was “Queens man evicted”.
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With a wry tone, the news outlet reported: “A 74-year-old Jamaica Estates developer has less than three months left at his current address after Americans overwhelmingly voted him out of the White House.”
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