A heinous crime was caught on camera this week when a Washington, D.C. area man threw a sandwich at an ICE agent. Air Force veteran Sean Dunn jumped up and down in front of the officer before throwing the footlong at point-blank range. He went ham, if you will. The agent, armed only with a gun and bulletproof vest, was defenseless to the battery of bread and meat. If you can stomach the violence, click below.
Content warnings: extreme violence, gluten.
This is one of the funnier things to come out of Trump’s D.C. takeover. What’s more distressing is the administration’s reaction. Dunn was arrested immediately after his throw and shortly released from custody. When federal charges were issued against Dunn, his lawyer called prosecutors so Dunn could turn himself in. But prosecutors didn’t return her calls—instead, a dozen officers in combat-style tactical gear arrested Dunn in his apartment during the night before his next court date. The arrest was captured on a heavily edited video posted online the next day.
Your tax dollars hard at work.
Timestamp: 11:09 PM. Location: an apartment building in D.C.’s posh West End neighborhood. Officers stand in a circle, thinking of how they’re going to explain to their partners why they missed dinner. Cut to timestamp: 11:13 PM. I’m surprised they all fit in one elevator. They knock on Dunn’s door. Not too loud, neighbors are sleeping. Cut to Dunn arrested, hands behind his collared shirt. You can’t see his face, indeed, you can’t see any faces. Good cameramen film exclusively the back of the head. Timestamp: 11:23 PM. Officers took 14 minutes to arrest a man who, earlier that day, had asked to go to jail.
Dunn was later charged with federal felony assault of a police officer, which carries an 8-year maximum sentence. That’s the same charge that many now-pardoned Jan. 6th rioters once faced. He has since been released from court on his own recognizance.
Art by Jesse Rubenfeld from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 7, Issue 37
Italian writer Umberto Eco, when describing the essential characteristics of fascism, wrote that, “by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” “The followers [of fascism] must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies,” while at the same time, they “must be convinced that they can overwhelm their enemies.” Trump embodies this idea. For him, the radical left is “the enemy from within… more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.” But in the social media era, generating this image also requires creating scenarios where the administration can record and post its impossible, inevitable victories. This means videos like the one above, where officers mime heroism while success is guaranteed.
So what to do about this? Well, one thing you can do, from the comfort of your own couch, even, is laugh. Because this whole ordeal is ridiculous. Everything we’ve just discussed is an enormous waste of resources—from the nameless White House intern who shouldn’t have put Adobe Premier Pro on his resume, to the meatball sub mercilessly abandoned on the sidewalk. D.C. police could be dealing with more dangerous criminals, like jaywalkers and bad tippers. Everyone involved in the production knows their time is being wasted. So appreciate the absurdity, if even for a moment, lest your time be wasted, too.
Art by C.M. Duffy from Current Affairs magazine, Issue 10, November-December 2017
