Test Post

The jurors in the case of The United States of America v. The Sandwich Guy (as Sean Charles Dunn is better known) sized one another up before the final group had even been selected, asking, “Did you attend the ‘No Kings’ march?”

“It’s like, You’re damn right I went,” one juror told me, referring to the anti-Trump protests throughout the country last month, including in Washington, D.C. (The juror, who spoke with me several days after she and 11 of her peers found Dunn not guilty of assault, did so anonymously because, as she explained, Donald Trump’s administration is “very vengeful,” and she fears retribution.)

The facts of the incident are ostensibly simple: In the early days of Trump’s militarization of the nation’s capital, Dunn—a 37-year-old Air Force veteran and, at the time, Justice Department employee—screamed at federal officers stationed in a popular nightlife corridor, repeatedly calling them fascists, and then hurled a Subway footlong at a Customs and Border Protection agent, hitting him squarely in the chest. “I did it. I threw a sandwich,” Dunn confessed to law enforcement upon being apprehended—a sort of modern Williams Carlos Williams (“I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox …”) for the more carnivorous, angrier set. Although it was widely reported at the time that the sandwich was salami, Dunn later said it was turkey.

Four days later, despite Dunn offering to surrender to the police, at least half a dozen law-enforcement officials in tactical gear staged a nighttime raid on his apartment, bringing him out in handcuffs—footage of which the White House blasted out in a highly stylized video, reminiscent of a Netflix FBI thriller. Finally, after a federal grand jury failed to indict him on a felony charge, prosecutors attempted to get him on misdemeanor assault.

Like nearly everything involving Trump, the episode became polarizing, absurdist, stripped of nuance—a Rorschach test for both one’s politics and one’s life experience. (As someone who in my early 30s lived just off the nightlife corridor near 14th and U Streets where the hoagie histrionics occurred, I initially assumed: Drunk dude, egged on by drunk people, does drunk thing.)

Read: Why is the National Guard in D.C.? Even they don’t know.

And so, in an escapade to which everyone brought a deeply personal perspective—the government that dubbed Dunn an “example of the Deep State”; the D.C. residents who turned him into a Resistance folk hero memorialized in street art and Halloween costumes; the sandwich thrower himself, whose lawyers portrayed him as unfairly targeted by the Trump administration—the 12 jurors found themselves simply trying to do their jobs, as fairly and impartially as possible.