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John Kraus received his second phone call from the police in 48 hours from an officer with news about his car: a crowd of a little more than 20 people had gathered around it, and the officer called to ask permission to wash off the anti-gay slurs scrawled in red paint on all sides of the vehicle.

According to Pullman Police, Kraus reported the anti-gay slurs on his vehicle Thursday morning, around 8 a.m. After posting about the incident on Facebook, he came back to his apartment to find approximately 20 people cleaning it off his car.

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Afterward, the officer escorted Kraus to the police station and then hand-washed and waxed his car for him. Kraus was encouraged by his roommate to make the photos he posted on Facebook public, and the initial anger he felt upon seeing his car transformed into determination, he said.

“I wanted people to see what happened,” Kraus said. “The more people will see it, the more people will see that it’s happening.”

President-elect Donald Trump needs to be held accountable for the rhetoric he used on the campaign trail, Kraus said. Additionally, citizens need to be more politically engaged than ever, he said.

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“Trump says he’s an ally to LGBT people,” Kraus said. “The Republican party has stated they want to increase funding for conversion therapy, which is a terrible thing you can do to a person. Vice President (-elect) Mike Pence – one of the most anti-LGBT political figures out there – defunded HIV treatment to fund conversion therapy.”

At a local level, Kraus believes people of different political leanings in Pullman have to be willing to discuss acts of intolerance and hatred when they occur. He said the people who disagreed with Kraus on social media and asked him to provide proof that this was caused by Trump’s election are missing the point.

Kraus said now that Trump is America’s highest elected official, certain groups of people may feel their long-held views are now validated and acceptable to express publicly.

“I think people have always felt this way,” Kraus said of the anti-LGBT sentiment directed toward him and other across the country. “It’s always been around, it’s always existed. Trump just gave a way for people to normalize it and make it acceptable to be discriminatory toward people.”

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, there were 5,850 total hate crimes in 2015 and 5,479 reported in 2014.