President Donald Trump’s military occupation of Washington continues to descend into an embarrassing farce with failed prosecutions and National Guard members stuck on trash cleanup duty.
On Tuesday, Trump said that the occupation was proof that, like a dictator, he can do “anything” he wants and that he intends to dispatch the National Guard and other federal law enforcement to other states. Similarly, his administration has said that his actions are justified because of a purported “crime emergency.”
But as Trump was touting his actions, video emerged of the National Guard members picking up trash, dressed in full fatigues and safety vests in Lafayette Park next to the White House.
The tranquil scene reinforces the fact that crime in the nation’s capital dropped to a 30-year low in 2024 under President Joe Biden. Trump has been targeting the city—which has a significant Black population and a Black mayor—as his administration desperately tries to move attention away from the Epstein scandal.
Now Trump has pushed for federal forces to carry guns around the capital, and photographs depicting troops marching through Washington under banners of Trump’s face have reinforced his fascist sentiments.
But on the ground, things aren’t quite fully in Trump’s grasp, and he isn’t doing much better on the legal front.
The infamous notion that a grand jury “could indict a ham sandwich” appears to have been disproven by the Trump administration’s sloppy handling of crime issues in Washington.
On Tuesday, a grand jury rejected the Justice Department’s case against Sean Dunn, a former DOJ employee who threw a ham sandwich at a federal agent, and refused to indict him.
Former Fox News conspiracy theorist-turned-Washington Attorney General Jeanine Pirro decided to make Dunn’s case into an example of how the Trump administration is cracking down on “crime.” So she and her office pursued felony charges, but the grand jury said no.
The rejection echoes the problems the DOJ has faced in trying to secure an indictment against Washington resident Torez Riley, who was accosted for being Black and wearing a backpack. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui dismissed the charges, calling the case “the most illegal search I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Blue state governors like JB Pritzker of Illinois and Wes Moore of Maryland have stepped up their rhetoric on the need to protect their constituents from Trump’s overreach—and so far the administration’s fumbles are helping make that case.