Protesters from a gay rights advocacy group protested Donald Trump when he was in Washington D.C. | Getty Trump met by swarm of LGBT activists at deposition

Donald Trump on Wednesday declared himself the biggest champion of LGBT community, saying he’s gotten huge praise for his response to the Orlando massacre at a gay nightclub.

On Thursday, a swarm of protesters told him to shove it.


Forced to take a break from the campaign trail to give a deposition at a law firm in Washington, Trump was met with dozens of protesters from the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ-rights advocacy group, who pushed back against his inflammatory comments.

The protesters arrived around 9:45 a.m. and barely missed Trump, who entered on an opposite side of the D.C. office of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, but stayed to try to catch him on the way out. HRC communications director Jay Brown said Trump's "divisive anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant rhetoric" spurred the group to protest, as well as geographic convenience.

The HRC office, with "Love Wins" plastered across two stories of windows, is right across 17th Street from the Pillsbury office.

In a memo distributed to the media, the HRC blasted Trump for suggesting he would repeal President Barack Obama's executive orders, which include protections for LGBTQ employees from discrimination, and for his comments about women and Muslims.

Though Trump has said he is "traditional" when it comes to the definition of marriage, he has countered mainstream Republican thought on the issue of transgender people using the bathroom that conforms with their chosen gender identity. In an April interview on the Today show, Trump said transgender people should use whatever bathroom they feel is appropriate.

In the direct aftermath of the Orlando terrorist attack, Trump on Monday made a direct appeal to the LGBT community.

“Ask yourself, who is really the friend of women and the LGBT community, Donald Trump with his actions, or Hillary Clinton with her words? Clinton wants to allow Radical Islamic terrorists to pour into our country—they enslave women, and murder gays,” he said during a national security address.

And on Wednesday, at a rally in Atlanta, he again talked up his appeal.

"The LGBT community, the gay community, the lesbian community – they are so much in favor of what I've been saying over the last three or four days,” he said.

Nevertheless, holding signs plastered with "Love Conquers Hate" and "Love Wins," the protesters anxiously gathered near Trump's motorcade on the Rhode Island Street side of the office.

They continued with chants of "Love conquers hate" as Trump left in his motorcade at 12:10 p.m., but there was no discernible reaction from the presumptive Republican nominee.

Trump was deposed in a case he filed against celebrity chef Geoffrey Zakarian, who backed away from a scheduled restaurant opening at the planned Trump International Hotel in D.C. after the candidate's controversial presidential announcement speech last June, where he called undocumented Mexican immigrants “rapists” and drug peddlers.

Trump is in litigation over a similar lawsuit with chef Jose Andres, who also backed out of constructing a restaurant in Trump's planned hotel at the site of the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. The most recent hearing in that case was held on Wednesday, where Trump's attorney Rebecca Woods argued that Andres' "passionate politics" blew up their business deal.

