In Haverford, 80-somethings and 90-somethings take to the road to protest Trump

There’s a first time for everything. Judy Bardes, like most women in the so-called Quiet Generation who went to colleges like her alma mater, Bryn Mawr, in the early 1950s, was never the protesting type.

But on Saturday, Bardes — who’s 93, “almost 94″ — joined about 85 other residents of the Quadrangle senior community in suburban Haverford who lined a stretch of Darby Road near the front gate. The protesters, the bulk of whom were in their 80s, were voicing their fury at the growing authoritarianism of the Donald Trump presidency, joining a nationwide protest called “No Kings!”

“Our democracy is at stake and whatever it takes to bring it back to a democracy rather than a dictatorship, I’m willing to work to participate,” Bardes, who grew up in Elkins Park and eventually worked supporting local philanthropies, told me, as passing cars honked loudly in support of the protest.

She carried a sign that was anything but mild-mannered: “Stop the Gestapo! !Bring [Kilmar Abrego] Garcia Home!” — urging the release of the Salvadoran refugee whom U.S. immigration agents mistakenly put on a deportation flight and sent to a notorious gulag in his native country. A regular reader of The Inquirer and the New York Times and a nightly watcher of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, the nonagenarian said she’s horrified by Abrego Garcia’s treatment and called the Trump regime’s insistence that he can’t be brought back “a lot of malarkey.”

“This is the first time I’ve been able to put myself, my body, into a protest,” Bardes said, on an unusually balmy April afternoon. “It’s still scary to think what I’m fighting against.”

The protest outside the Quadrangle was just one of hundreds of demonstrations and marches in all 50 states on Saturday, rivaling a similar event two weeks ago as one of the largest protest events in American history. It was a powerful message from everyday citizens terrified over the authoritarian path of a presidency that hits the three-month mark on Sunday. It was beyond fitting that the rallies took place on the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution at the battles of Lexington and Concord — the last time people in these parts threw off the shackles of monarchy.

OK, the 80-somethings and occasional 90-something protesting in the Philadelphia Main Line suburbs that were once the setting for a TV drama thirtysomething weren’t around for that. But many of the Quadrangle demonstrators did remember growing up during the horrors of World War II, and some had marched for the end of Jim Crow segregation and the Vietnam War. In 2025, they are heartbroken at the direction they see America going in their twilight years.

For one 89-year-old protester, the nation’s crisis is deeply personal. Peter Stern wore a black baseball cap, a stylish paisley shirt, and waved a “Hands Off!” protest sign decrying the Trump regime’s cuts to science and research and the Veterans Administration, and its political interference at the Justice Department. When I asked him why he came out to Darby Road, he gave a simple answer.

“I’m a Holocaust survivor,” he said.

Stern was born in 1936 in Nuremberg, three years after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took over Germany. Like most German Jews, his family spent the World War II years on the run, dumped for a time in the Riga ghettos in Latvia before his dad was finally sent to the Buchenwald camp, where he died. Although more than 90% of German Jewish children died under Hitler, Stern, his mom and brother somehow survived the Bergen-Belsen camp and were rescued by British troops in 1945. After settling on the East Coast, the now-89-year-old tells his story at area schools and colleges.

“No one envisioned that that could happen, or get started,“ Stern told me of the Holocaust. ”I came to say that something as nasty as that can happen again — and it can, without me saying something.” Stern’s criticisms of the 47th president weren’t as pointed as others’, but he called for the humanity from our government that he hasn’t seen since Trump took office in January. He bemoaned “the lack of courage to face our problems without blaming someone else.”

Behind Stern, his fellow seniors lined the busy suburban road for about 50 yards, many in folding chairs, with a few leaning against walkers or in wheelchairs, brandishing signs as basic as “Hands Off Social Security” or as funny as “Ikea Has Better Cabinets.” What does it say about this strange moment that so many seniors find themselves manning the barricades of a second American Revolution?

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It starts with the acknowledgement that Haverford’s Quadrangle is probably not the typical American senior community, in a nation where the over-65 vote was evenly divided in 2024 between the GOP’s Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris. Founded in 1975 by nine alums of nearby Haverford College, most of them Quakers, the Quadrangle draws a disproportionate share of ex-professors, scientists and lawyers. It’s much, much more common, residents said, to hear MSNBC’s Maddow blaring from an apartment than Fox News — when folks aren’t reading the print New York Times, or Heather Cox Richardson’s latest missive.

So it’s no wonder so many decided to turn their increasingly angry and dismayed chatter around the nightly dinner table toward action, starting with the April 5 “Hands Off!” protest.

Julie Stern, Peter’s wife, who is 85 and has lived at the complex for 11 years, said the tenor of the conversation since January was, “‘I wish we could do something, I wish we could do something — what can we do?’ These are people of a certain age, so it’s hard to take the SEPTA downtown to go on the march and so I said, ‘Why don’t we do something here?’ Do you want to have a sign-making party?’ and they said ‘Yes!‘"

It’s also true that senior citizens feel they have more to lose as they watch Trump’s sidekick — Elon Musk, the world’s richest man — brandishing a chainsaw and cutting the staffers who send their Social Security checks and threatening to slash benefits as well. Many of their protest signs invoked saving Social Security or Medicare.

“I find that they are decimating the protections for us, when they should be looking at the welfare of the populace, and I find they’re spending all of their time for their own benefit, to raise money for themselves, and cut it for services we need,” Carol Reiss, a 76-year-old retired speech therapist from Long Island who moved to the Quadrangle two years ago, said. But Reiss and others also touched on something much deeper — that the generation born in the shadow of World War II understands the risks to society in a way that younger folks just can’t.

Many of the folks I met at the Quadrangle were born amid a Great Depression and witnessed a horrific global conflagration, but spent most of their adult lives in a time when college was the American Dream, science was venerated, and the government was trusted as a way to help everyday citizens. No one wanted to see it all fall apart in their final years, to think they might be leaving the planet no better than they found it. Their voices may quiver a bit, but they raised them this weekend.

“Our generation experienced World War II, and we experienced and know of the Nazis,” Reiss said. “And we are traveling right down that same road that Hitler did in Germany, and Trump is doing to us now, and it’s so reprehensible to us to see it happening to our glorious nation.”

Her last words were nearly drowned out by another beeping car horn, a suburban salute to a generation that can no longer stay silent.

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