The online celebrity, legal woes, and final liberation of the irate, ICE-defying DC resident known throughout the world as Sandwich Guy seem tailor-made for late-night TV wisecracking. But given that we’re presently slogging through the world’s stupidest fascist timeline, the Sandwich Guy set piece can give us some surprisingly useful lessons in how to mount protests that can deflate the Mussolini-style self-regard of the MAGA power elite.

The original incident, caught on a bystander’s phone, showed former Department of Justice employee Sean C. Dunn in a loud and heated conversation with a group of federal agents patrolling the capital city’s nightlife corridor on U Street. This, as it happens, was on August 10, the night before President Donald Trump announced a phony crime emergency to justify a plainly illegal mobilization of federal officers to supersede local law enforcement. Dunn was carrying a recently purchased Subway sandwich and abruptly hurled it at the chest of one of the agents before tearing down U Street at an impressive clip before his pursuers finally caught and arrested him. Attorney General Pam Bondi fired him after his arrest, declaring on social media that the hoagie-slinging malefactor was “an example of the Deep State we have been up against.”

At a moment when Trump and his authoritarian lackeys were peddling lurid and untrue tales of the mortal peril that the mean streets of Washington posed to ordinary God-fearing Americans, the viral video of Dunn’s exploits was a welcome and entertaining documentation of what was really happening in DC: A corps of federal agents cosplaying as righteous peacekeepers was menacing residents for no good reason.

Dunn’s status as a white Air Force veteran sporting the most preppy imaginable summer attire punctured Trump’s racist claim that the miscreants wreaking mayhem in the district were all Black, brown, and immigrant perpetrators. Here was a guy who not only looked like he could be an employee of the Trump administration but until recently actually was one, performing a brave, if absurd, act of resistance against MAGA brownshirts.

Then, of course, there was the sandwich itself, which instantly birthed a legion of online jokes and memes, together with an avalanche of labored headline puns. No Kings demonstrators turned up with oversize inflatable sandwiches, and a widely circulated bit of graffiti modeled on a Banksy work depicted an antifa-style insurgent preparing to hurl a sandwich in lieu of the flowers featured in the original.

This was all just a prelude, though, to the absurdist main event: the Trump administration’s dogged efforts to prosecute and jail Dunn for his late-night snack attack. Prosecutors initially sought to get a DC grand jury to indict Dunn on a felony assault charge, without success—triggering still another torrent of jokes citing the old line about district attorneys inducing grand juries to indict a ham sandwich..

The prosecution, led by former Fox News vengeance merchant Jeanine Pirro, who took over as DC’s district attorney after Ed Martin, the MAGA thug initially appointed by Trump, proved too extreme even for Senate Republicans to confirm him, was forced to downgrade the assault charge to a misdemeanor. (This was after Pirro recorded a gloating video hailing the prosecution as a showpiece of Trump’s DC crackdown and telling Dunn to “stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else.”) That maneuver just made the whole effort seem like the desperate and corrupt Trump-appeasing parody of legal probity that it actually was.

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This past week’s jury trial accordingly provided the sort of bloviating and surreal asides immortalized in the courtroom chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (which, let us recall, also centered around an act of comestible criminality—the alleged theft of tarts). Prosecutors called two witnesses—a DC transit cop who saw the whole episode unfold, and Gregory Lairmore, the Customs and Border Patrol agent whose heavily padded vest absorbed Dunn’s yeasty fusillade. “The sandwich kind of exploded all over my uniform,” the agent testified in a labored bid to make a fast-food item seem like a hazardous projectile. “It smelled of onions and mustard.”

In the annals of anguished courtroom testimony, Lairmore’s performance fell short of a climactic Aaron Sorkin or Perry Mason scene, but it did wonders in magnifying just how far out of their way Trump’s corps of MAGA-ratchiks would go to manufacture a threat out of thin air—or a condiments bar, as the case may be. Indeed, just like the initial video that touched off Dunn’s unlikely global renown, the federal case against him served only to underline how tetchy, brittle, and self-serious the administrators of our fascist takeover truly are. (Though anyone reviewing coverage of Trump’s Caligulan Great Gatsby Halloween celebration in Mar-a-Lago can see Pirro in a moment of fanciful ease along with a sequined burlesque dancer in a giant champagne coupe.) When you’ve reached the point of compelling a heavily armed federal interloper to drive home the unbearable trauma of being assailed with the scent of onions and mustards, it’s a fair bet that no jury is going to convict.

Mind you, even that agitprop overture from Pirro’s team promptly went south during Lairmore’s cross-examination from Dunn’s defense attorney, Sabrina Shroff. She brandished a photo from the scene showing Dunn’s sandwich lying on the ground, largely intact in its wrapper, after Dunn’s fateful throw. She noted further that Lairmore’s coworkers had presented him with his own plush toy sandwich as a gag gift, which he displayed in his office, together with a decal featuring Dunn in the act of sandwich hoisting, above the legend “Felony Footlong.” Lairmore affixed that, appropriately, to his lunchbox. As Shroff pointed out, victims of actual assault don’t typically display jokey souvenirs of the act: “If someone assaulted you, someone offended you, would you keep a memento of that assault?” she asked. “Would you stick it on your daily lunchbox and carry it around with you?”

For all the ludicrousness of the Trump administration’s crusade to turn Dunn into a bread-bearing terrorist, the deeper logic of his prosecution is still driving MAGA’s quest for maximal impunity and total submission from the citizens and immigrants they harass, hound, and unjustly detain, arrest, and rendition. Another DC ICE protester was arrested (though never actually charged) after he followed federal law enforcement agents around while blasting the “Imperial March” from Star Wars—Darth Vader’s theme song—to mock the needless DC mobilization; he has now filed a civil suit in collaboration with the ACLU, alleging violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, together with claims of false arrest and battery.

Far more seriously, ICE commander at large Gregory Bovino, who is overseeing the Trump administration’s “Midway Blitz” initiative targeting Chicago-area immigrants and protesters, recently testified in a suit over the crackdown that he had instructed agents to arrest anyone making “hyperbolic comments” during protests. ICE’s former Chicago field director, Russell Hott, testified in the same case that he did not agree that arresting people for voicing dissent over the operations of Midway Blitz would be unconstitutional. In the face of this demented view of how we exercise our civil liberties, a steady barrage of airborne sandwiches would represent a rational and measured response.