In what was perhaps the grandest metaphor of a week’s worth of visiting Republican Party retreat members being literally cornered by protestors wherever they found themselves in downtown Philadelphia — grander still than even the fact that the city deemed to protect the Loews Hotel where they were staying by using trash trucks to block off the streets — a ghost train of sorts was there to carry them off, back to Washington, D.C., this morning. When protestors arrived at 30th Street Station late this morning, to greet the visiting GOP one last time for the week with messages of dissent and resistance to an increasingly aberrant, toxic presidency, they soon realized: None from the party had the courage to enter the station, and take the train that had been chartered on the GOP’s behalf.

“They totally had a private chartered train waiting for them at the station that pulled away empty because none of the GOP were willing to walk into the station,” one protestor on the scene told us. “The Amtrak agent had called for the boarding of the charter train number, over and over announcing its departure,” she said, “and then conferred with the protest organizers, who then announced it to the crowd.” Whereupon the crowd cheered. It was a fitting and triumphant end to a week that saw so many in Philadelphia responding to the absurd madness and craven greed of the Trump presidency in a way that the city’s founders would have been both proud of, and there for.

In so very many ways, they were.