Copyright vanityfair
On Thursday, Trump’s Justice Department was delivered a legal setback—with an extra helping of humiliation—when jurors found Sean Dunn not guilty of misdemeanor assault on a federal officer over an August incident in which Dunn chucked a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent in Washington. The 37-year-old former DOJ paralegal had thrown the sub at agent Greg Lairmore as an act of resistance against Trump’s crackdown in DC; the government argued that he “crossed a line” and interfered with law enforcement operations. The sandwich, Lairmore testified this week, “exploded” on his chest: “It smelled of onions and mustard,” the agent testified. Jurors were unconvinced that constituted assault. The DOJ first got a taste of failure back in August, when US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox personality, tried to charge Dunn with a felony, but could not persuade a grand jury to approve the federal indictment. “I’m relieved,” Dunn said after his acquittal Thursday, “and I’m looking forward to moving on with my life.” Later on Thursday, district judge Sara Ellis sharply rebuked the federal government over its “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago, challenging the credibility of CBP commander Greg Bovino and other agents over their trumped-up justifications for an extraordinary use of force in the city. The feds have engaged in activity in Chicago that “shocks the conscience,” as Ellis put it Thursday: There have been violent detentions, including one in which armed agents stormed into a daycare this week. Agents, including Bovino, who oversees Operation Midway, have deployed tear-gas in neighborhoods on protesters, without provocation. In one demonstration outside the Broadview immigration processing center, agents fired on a pastor, David Black, as he was praying, striking him in the head with a pepper bullet. The Department of Homeland Security said force was necessary to deal with “rioters, gangbangers, and terrorists.” On Thursday, though, Ellis said that “simply is untrue,” adding that the administration’s arguments “lack credibility.” Trump, of course, has rarely let a lack of credibility get in his way before. From business to television and now politics, he’s built his career on an ability to bend reality to his liking. But there are limits to how far even he can strain credulity, and he appeared to butt up against them this week. Even the Supreme Court, which opened the door to his anti-transgender passport policy this week and has usually been a reliable Trump ally in his second term, indicated it may be skeptical of his claim that he has the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs. On Tuesday, voters appeared to outright reject the rosy picture he’s tried to paint of the country and its economy under his leadership. Though Trump still insists that he is bringing back the American dream—“prices are coming down very fast,” he said this week, and we have “the most successful economy in the history of our country”—voters in races across the nation turned out for Democrats, apparently frustrated with rising prices, gloomy economic headwinds, and a historic shutdown. “Affordability is a problem,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, once one of the president’s most ardent allies, acknowledged on CNN Thursday. Not that you’d know from watching Trump, who took a break from planning his garish ballroom to host a Gatsby-themed Halloween party the weekend before Tuesday’s elections—a scene that served to underscore how out of touch this administration is with the reality of everyday Americans. Reality bites sometimes. This week, it hit Trump like a 12-inch hoagie to the chest.
