By David Shuster
Let it be recorded, in the annals of MAGA insanity, that twelve good citizens of Washington, D.C. just did what few men and women of sense are ever permitted to do in these times: they laughed the Trump government out of court.
Their instrument of deliverance? A sandwich.
Not a bomb, not a manifesto, not even a well-aimed shoe — but a sandwich, lobbed in mild disgust at one of those agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who serve as the Praetorian Guard of Trump’s bureaucratic power. Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi, ever alert to the dangers of bread and luncheon meat, decided the sandwich toss was an act of war upon the state itself. So, Bondi’s D.C. prosecutors hauled poor Sean Dunn — a former Justice Department paralegal turned late night snack insurgent — before the bar of justice, as if he had fired upon Fort Sumter.
Here, in microcosm, was the farce of the Trump age: DOJ prosecutors so puffed up with the Administration’s own importance that they mistook satire for sedition.
The fact this prosecution went forward at all tells us more about the administration’s character than any of its lofty pronouncements about “law and order.” The same Trump crowd that turns blind eyes to real abuses — corruption, perjury, the daily vandalism of reason — will leap from its golden MAGA chaise lounge the moment a protester hurls a hoagie. To these MAGA lunatics, a citizen’s right to dissent is conditional upon silence and servility. Toss a subway sandwich, and you’ve struck at the very fabric of the republic!
Fortunately, the jury was having none of it. In their wisdom, or perhaps their ordinary human amusement, they found that a sandwich striking an armored agent produces no “bodily injury” except to the delicate dignity of officialdom.
Relatedly, Sean Dunn’s defense attorney Julia Gatto never contested that her client had indeed tossed the sandwich, starting her opening statement with, “He did it. He threw the sandwich.” But she noted the legal issue was simple. “Bodily injury. That’s the standard.”
Assistant US Attorney John Parron argued that the case was “about the fact that you can’t go around throwing stuff at people when you’re mad,” and urged the jury to focus on that and not whatever opinions they may have about “the federal law enforcement presence in D.C.” Yes, the prosecutor was pleading for justice as though the Republic itself had been assaulted in Lafayette square.
Never has a jury so heroically resisted the siren call of idiocy. They sent the Trump DOJ prosecutors back to their desks, humiliated and defeated.
The testimony from Greg Lairmore, the agent who was struck by the sandwich, was likely persuasive for the jury, as he admitted he was not injured and had received gag gifts from his coworkers, including a “felony footlong” patch and a plush toy sandwich. Lairmore chuckled as he testified about these gifts and said he put the toy sandwich “on top of my shelf in the office” and the patch on his lunchbox.
Lairmore had claimed that the sandwich “exploded all over my chest” and “smelled of onions and mustard,” but was challenged about that on cross-examination by Sabrina Shroff, another of Dunn’s defense attorneys.
Shroff showed Lairmore a photo of the sandwich, emphasizing how it was still wrapped up in the Subway paper, lying on the ground, and asked him if he could tell what kind of sandwich it was and why there were no evidentiary photos of the stains he claimed had been left on his uniform.
One imagines an O-J trial moment of sorts. “If the mustard doesn’t sit, you must acquit. “ Sadly, the defense attorneys didn’t go there. They didn’t need to.
This case should have never been brought -- and would have never been brought -- if anyone in the Trump Justice department retained the faintest whiff of proportion or common sense. Sadly, the machinery of federal government stupidity under Trump is hard to stop.
Also, this prosecution was clearly not about public safety or decorum. It was about punishing mockery, that most intolerable of crimes to Trump’s stooges and their rotting, authoritarian leader.
But the jury, God bless them, understood something the Trump goons never will: liberty depends not on reverence, but on ridicule. When a government grows too absurd to laugh at, it grows too powerful to live under.
So here’s to the jury — a dozen ordinary citizens of Washington, D.C. who recognized that the true obscenity in this case was not sandwich thrower, but a Trumpian leadership so fragile that it must prosecute one.
The jury, in acquitting Sean Dunn, has done more for freedom than it may have realized.
And here’s to the Subway sandwich, too — the humble projectile that brought down not an ICE agent, but a Trumpian pretense.
