A group of antiwar activists got a chance to act out the political fantasy of millions of Americans by confronting President Donald Trump directly to his face.
The president and some senior administration officials made a performative visit Tuesday evening to a swanky restaurant near the White House, where they were greeted in the dining room of Joe's Seafood, Prime Steak and Stone Crab by a group of Code Pink protesters, reported The Daily Beast.
“While Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and others feasted at a steakhouse, we stood our ground and told them the truth,” said Code Pink’s D.C. organizer Olivia DiNucci in a statement.
Members of the self-described pacifist feminist organization managed to score a last-minute reservation after catching wind that Trump was going out for dinner – but they didn't realize that was his first time dining out in D.C. as president.
”We thought it was just going to be Trump, we didn’t know that it was all of his Cabinet, and we didn’t think they would be in such an open room — we thought he’d be in a different area — and we were placed really close to them,” she said.
Videos of the confrontation posted on social media show the activists shouting at the president, who stands up and begs staffers to shoo them out of the restaurant.
"[They] sat down right next to us, and people were giving them an applause," DiNucci said. "We were saying, ‘Free D.C., free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time' — saying that we need troops out of everywhere.”
Trump draws boos in his public appearances, but DiNucci and her fellow Code Pink activists got an opportunity to directly confront the president on the policies that matter to them.
”Trump looked us in the eyes, and we made sure he would never dine in peace while communities are under siege,” DiNucci said in the group’s statement.
”For us, it’s the fact that he’s eating food that is grown, picked, transported, by the very same people that his regime is abducting from their neighborhoods and terrorizing, at the same time funding and supporting the forced starvation and genocide of the Palestinian people, the amount that his Cabinet has wreaked havoc," DiNucci told The Daily Beast. ”We were in there saying that he will absolutely not be able to have dinner in peace.”