De Blasio: Keep protesting, Trump has no mandate

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) is encouraging Americans to keep protesting President-elect Donald Trump’s victory.

{mosads}De Blasio said in a radio interview Monday that Trump doesn’t have a mandate because the Republican is likely to lose the popular vote. 

“We have to recognize that all over this country, the more disruption that’s caused peacefully … the more it will change the trajectory of things,” he said. “We need to hold Trump accountable for anything he does that encourages hate and division. … The more extreme he is, the more people fight back, the more it takes away his power.”

De Blasio, who ran Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign, also blasted Trump’s statements that he as president would reinstate stop-and-frisk policing, which has been ruled unconstitutional.  

“The constitutional system … gives a lot of power to states and localities, and the federal government doesn’t get to tell us how to police our streets,” de Blasio said. “They can threaten to take away money, but they cannot tell us how to police our streets, and we are not going back to a broken policy of stop-and-frisk. That will never happen under my watch.”

De Blasio criticized the Obama administration and Clinton’s 2016 Democratic presidential campaign later in the interview, saying that Trump’s victory is a message that working-class people have felt underrepresented over the last eight years.

“Working people and middle-class people feel cheated, and they have every right to feel cheated,” he said. “There was no real reform after the recession [of 2008] and the crash on Wall Street. There was no real effort to reverse the gains of the 1 percent, so people feel cheated, and if Democrats and progressives don’t give [voters] a crystal clear understanding of how we are going to change that, of course they are going to feel dissatisfied and disconnected.”

De Blasio confirmed late Monday night that he had talked briefly with Trump over the phone and the two would soon meet face-to-face to discuss policy.