The Best Thing That Happened This Week: Philly Turned the Other Cheek

Photos | Dan McQuade

Considering Philly’s, um, confrontational reputation—remember what we did to that hitchhiking robot, let alone Santa Claus, not to mention that little Revolution we fomented?—the convergence of newly anointed POTUS Donald Trump, GOP leaders and the British Prime Minister here on Thursday seemed pretty incendiary. And that was before Trump diverged from his script to throw shade at us, declaring that our murder rate was “terribly increasing,” which ought to count as a first-degree crime against the man’s mother tongue. But hey, we got class. We got heart. We got Mayor Kenney, who stood up to the nation’s bully-in-chief, announcing that Trump’s “false statements” were “an insult to the men and women of the Philadelphia police force—the very same men and women who are working long hours today to ensure his safety.” More than that, we got smarts, on both sides of the barricades: The police announced on Friday that of the thousands of protesters who’d turned out, they’d made zero arrests.

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