On a street in Washington, D.C., on the night of Sunday, Aug. 10, a man threw a wrapped submarine sandwich directly at a Customs and Border Protection officer, striking said officer on the ballistic vest covering his chest. The sandwich fell to the ground, and the sandwich thrower turned and took off running at what seems in video to be a rather relaxed pace. Federal agents chased him and had him in handcuffs in no time. The assailant, Sean Charles Dunn, 37, was a Justice Department employee at the time of the confrontation and was swiftly fired by an exultant Attorney General Pam Bondi.
This confrontation occurred during President Trump’s “crime emergency” in D.C., a one-month period during which the president deployed to the streets of the city law enforcement officers from a variety of federal agencies — including Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — supposedly to back up the D.C. police.
During the election campaign last year, Trump had declared that D.C. was a “nightmare of murder and crime,” and he vowed to clean it up if reelected. Not much happened regarding that pledge until August, when a group of feral teenagers from D.C. and nearby parts assaulted and tried to carjack 19-year-old Edward Coristine, one of the employees of Elon Musk’s unofficial Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Coristine was beaten bloody during the mob assault, which took place on a public street, and Trump was incensed. That attack was the trigger for his declaration of a crime emergency in D.C. In addition to law enforcement officers drawn from federal agencies, the president deployed armed National Guard troops to walk city streets.
The crime emergency was limited by statute to 30 days, and it ended without an extension. Trump then declared, ridiculously, that there was “no crime” in D.C. “It took 12 days to solve the problem,” he told reporters early last month. Nonetheless, he is keeping the National Guard deployed here until next year. If crime has been banished from the city, why keep the Guard in the streets? Oh, right; that’s not about crime at all. How could I have forgotten? It’s about optics and Trump’s demented posturing as a strongman — and about his determination to intimidate a Democrat-led city. And since D.C. lies just outside his windows at the White House, this city is a convenient place for Trump to exhibit his plans.
Meanwhile, the kind of criminal and antisocial behaviors that are a permanent drag on the quality of life of law-abiding Washingtonians continue at their regular pace: The city stinks from end to end with the stench of weed being smoked in public (the emergency order and police surge did nothing about that); package thieves continue to run rampant (the emergency order and police surge did nothing about that. On the same weekend that Trump spoke of having solved the crime problem in “12 days,” 17-year-old Jermaine Durbin and 26-year-old Jerome Myles were killed in separate shootings in D.C.); street robberies and assaults continue (the emergency order and police surge did nothing about that); homicides continue (the emergency order and police surge did not stop that); the city’s open-air drug markets and the drug trade, which are a factor in homicides, otherwise still flourish (the emergency order and police surge did nothing about that). And so much else that should not be happening does continue to happen.
Local Washington reacted with anger to Trump’s emergency declaration and the deployment of extra law enforcement personnel. Locally, the security action was decried as a hostile occupation — not because Washingtonians love crime but because they do not trust Donald Trump. They regard him, with good reason, as a deceiver with toxic motives driving malignant schemes.
It was in this climate that Dunn threw his sandwich at a CBP officer and became a local hero.
The U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, the former Fox television host Jeanine Pirro, seized on Dunn’s sandwich throwing to illuminate the Trump administration’s toughness on crime (this is absurd, considering Jan. 6 and Trump’s own grant of hundreds of pardons to supporters of his who committed crimes on that infamous day). Pirro’s office tried to persuade a grand jury in D.C. to indict Dunn on a charge of felony assault. The grand jury demurred. Undaunted, Pirro’s office brought a charge of misdemeanor assault against Dunn (a misdemeanor charge in D.C. does not require a grand jury indictment). The case went to trial, and a D.C. jury acquitted Dunn on Thursday.
This acquittal was a clear rebuke by a selection of D.C. residents of the Trump administration’s fascistic approach to governance. And the chastisement in a court of law occurred in the same week in which Democrats made a powerful showing in elections in multiple states and municipalities. In Virginia, former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, whom Trump had denounced as “a disaster,” handily defeated Republican candidate Winsome Earle-Sears, whom Trump had described as “very good” and “excellent.”
In the Virginia lieutenant governor’s race, Democrat Ghazala Hashmi beat Republican John Reid, also handily. But the strongest signal-sending Democratic victory anywhere nationally on the day may have been that of former Virginia state delegate Jay Jones in the contest to be Virginia’s next attorney general. Jones defeated the incumbent, Republican Jason Miyares, by just over six percentage points. What is remarkable about this outcome is that Virginians elected Jones despite his being engulfed in a damaging text-message scandal in the closing weeks of the campaign. Here is a synopsis from Politico:
In August 2022, Jones wrote about shooting then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert in text messages he sent to Republican state Del. Carrie Coyner. The texts, which were first reported by National Review and subsequently viewed by The Washington Post, have not independently been confirmed by POLITICO, but Jones has not questioned their veracity and has publicly apologized for them.
“Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot,” Jones wrote. “Gilbert gets two bullets to the head.”
“Jay,” Coyner responded. “Please stop.”
In a normal time, Jones would have been out of the race very shortly after Coyner made the text messages public with a month left in the campaign. Jones stayed in. He weathered such public outrage as resulted and the Republican Party broadsides that emerged and ultimately won the race. Coyner, meanwhile, lost her reelection bid to a Democrat in the election on Tuesday.
For a majority of Virginia voters on this occasion, Jones’s dreadful sentiments could be overlooked. Perhaps it was a case of “needs must when the devil drives,” and the devil in this scenario would be the moral bankruptcy and fecklessness of the Republican Party in general. The fact is that Republicans are in no position to lecture anyone about moral failings and scandalous behavior. They do avidly support Trump, after all. By so doing, they show us exactly who they are.
The voters’ willingness to overlook Jones’s egregious conduct is an index of the level of their disgust with the Republican camp headed by Donald Trump. This is a stark warning to the U.S. political right of the electoral bloodbath that is coming for it in the midterm elections next November.
Meanwhile on Tuesday, in New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli in the governor’s race. And in New York City, Zohran Mamdani, running on the Democratic Party ticket, won the race for mayor over some guy named Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa.
In a multitude of races in multiple states, Democrats triumphed in a wave that clearly signals wide national discontent with the performance and behavior of Donald Trump and his administration — and the GOP nationally.
One of the other seismic Democratic wins occurred in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County, where “voters elected a Democratic district attorney for the first time since the 1800s, part of a Democratic sweep of every county office, including controller and recorder of deeds,” the Washington Post reported on Saturday.
Something is happening in the country. The political tide is turning against the MAGA-captured Republican Party. The poisonous MAGA mindset as seen in ruinous policies emanating from Donald Trump and his government are driving an awakening of courage and reason in the country.
Some would call it a backlash. I call it overdue and say, “How sweet it is!”
Democracy Warrior 