They didn't have the white supremacists to confront.

But the 400 counter-protesters, ranging from high school students to socialists, who flocked to a tony shopping district in downtown Princeton on Saturday vented their anger at another source of discontent and anxiety: President Donald Trump.

Actually, it was a large, inflatable Trump chicken, with a shock of bronze hair. The chicken loomed over the crowd near Nassau Street. To many gathered in the cold, Trump was the Great Enabler, the one who has made it comfortable for white supremacists to assert themselves in the public square

Trump's harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric, his validating of white supremacist marchers at Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, and his grudging disavowal of David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, has made it OK to hate in pubic again. And it was that sentiment that fueled the counter-protesters' fury.

So, even though members of the New Jersey European Heritage Association called off their march on Friday night, claiming that it was a hoax all along, the counter-protesters hit the square with their own Trump-inspired agenda.

"I think the higher levels of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, the spike in violence and intolerance, many of us find appalling," said Julia Sass Rubin, a Rutgers University public policy professor and a Princeton resident.

"It doesn't feel like the country that we thought we were living in," she said.

Assemblyman Andrew Zwicker, D-Princeton, who took part in the march, cited the "hatred that spews from this White House and this president. People are united to make sure their voices are heard."

Some arrived just to make sure that the white supremacist group wasn't throwing everybody -- the town, the police, the wider liberal activist community in central Jersey -- a curveball. Nobody was ready to take a white supremacist cancellation announcement on Twitter at face value.

And many feared that Princeton would become an ugly sequel to Charlottesville, the August 2017 riot that erupted amid a protest over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in a downtown park. It was foremost on the mind of Princeton Police Chief Nicholas Sutter, who mobilized a veritable mini-army of 45 officers and another roughly 40 officers from a nearby town to thwart a possible threat.

"We had an extensive plan in place to extract agitators and prevent violence if need be. While we didn't have a huge expectation of that, we were prepared for it,'' he said, leaning against a barricade at Palmer Square. "We start at the worst case scenario and work back."

But many protesters were also fueled by a sense of being burned when Trump stunned the political world with his victory. That shock has given rise to a new vigilance. They had sat back smugly and passive and confident that Trump and his alt-right fans would lose and fade into history as a ugly footnote.

"The sleepwalking was something that needed to be shattered,'' said Cornel West, the civil rights activist and author who joined the marchers who filed along Palmer Square loop. "And that's what we are seeing. But it's a beautiful thing, though....you're seeing the love train right now."

Francesco Vollaro, chair of the social justice ministry United Universalist Church in Princeton, said the new activism of the Trump era had to be aggressive, pro-active and counter any perceived threat -- even one that didn't show up.

"The smallest thing has the largest implication. We can't take it as a one-off. We have to react...so it doesn't grow,'' she said.

As the marchers gathered for a final round of speeches, one woman led the crowd with a chant of "I believe that we will win" before others spoke. But one sign a protester carried gave voice to the protest's undercurrent.

"Love -- not hate makes America Great,'' the sign read, a reference to Trump's favorite slogan. Minutes later, the sign passed by the inflatable Trump, the largest figure at the rally.

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