PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — About 1,000 people gathered at City Hall on Monday before marching down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to the Art Museum to protest recent actions taken by the Trump administration, including disbanding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and giving Elon Musk access to IRS records.
Philadelphia’s Presidents Day protest, one of several in major cities across the country, was the first protest Caitlin Frazier has ever organized, but she managed to gather a large crowd.
“Everybody’s upset about something, so we’re all coming together to use our voices together to make a change,” she said.
It was not as large as the crowd for the Eagles parade, but Mark Stier of the Pennsylvania Policy Center said that was understandable.
“We only celebrate a Super Bowl a couple of times in our life. We’ve got to defend our democracy and our way of life every single day.”
The protest denounced actions taken by Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk, who leads the new Department of Government Efficiency, an outside-government organization created to slash federal spending.
Stier ticked off actions Trump has taken with no legal basis, such as shutting down departments and agencies created by Congress and freezing spending approved by Congress. Challenges in court have called it an unconstitutional misuse of executive authority.
He urged the crowd not to feel discouraged.
“You are the only people who can stop it,” he said.
That is exactly what brought Nancy to the march.
“I’m hoping we’ll increase our numbers and our momentum and our strength, so we can defend our Constitution,” she said.
State Sen. Vincent Hughes, who also spoke, exhorted the crowd not to feel powerless.
“We have been here before. We are not going back,” he said.
City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier also spoke.
“When they write the history books about this moment, let’s make sure it’s not just about Trump and about Elon but also about how Philadelphians did not blink when they tried to take away our rights and our freedoms.”
It was just what people in the crowd, like Sharon, needed to hear.
“I was just so stressed about everything that I felt I needed to reach out and do something. So here I am, my first protest—not my last, but my first.”
The march was part of a national Presidents Day protest, dubbed “No Kings on Presidents Day,” in major cities and state capitols coordinated by a group called 50501, which is calling for the removal of Musk from government and the re-instatement of initiatives Trump has removed through executive orders. It followed a similar nationwide event on Feb. 5, which also drew participants in dozens of cities.