A pacifist protest group has revealed how they managed to score a table inside a swanky seafood restaurant where President Donald Trump dined on Tuesday night.
The organization, Code Pink, claimed responsibility for protests that took place inside the local D.C. restaurant Trump chose to dine out at for the first time as president.
Flanked by senior administration officials including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump was greeted inside Joe’s Seafood by protesters waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “Free D.C.! Free Palestine! Trump is the Hitler of our time!” and “Stop terrorizing communities all over the world!”
Code Pink, which describes itself as a pacifist feminist organization, claimed responsibility in a press release accompanied by multiple videos taken inside the restaurant that show the group demonstrating in the dining room.
“While Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and others feasted at a steakhouse, we stood our ground and told them the truth,” Code Pink’s D.C. organizer Olivia DiNucci said in the statement.
In a video posted by Code Pink to social media, DiNucci said that Trump and his Cabinet members “sat down right next to us, and people were giving them an applause. We were saying, ‘Free D.C., free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time—saying that we need troops out of everywhere.”
”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.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, DiNucci revealed how the group managed to get inside the restaurant. ”We actually had a reservation, and got it pretty last-minute, and went in,” she said.
”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 explained.
Footage posted by an official White House account attempted to portray an overwhelmingly positive reception to Trump’s appearance at the restaurant, writing on X that the president was “greeted with cheers,” avoiding any mention of the protest. In footage obtained by CNN, other diners can be heard booing the protesters. The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
The outing was seemingly planned in response to a reporter who pointed out that the president had never been seen dining at a D.C. restaurant that wasn’t inside his own hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue.
A reporter began to ask him during a press conference in the Oval Office last week, “You haven’t gone to one (restaurant) in either of your terms that wasn’t—” before they were interrupted by the president.
Trump said, “How do you know? Do you want me to prove you wrong?”
“I think it’s something we could consider doing,” he continued. “Love to do it. I love the White House food, but after a while, I could see going to a nice restaurant. It’s safe.”
While DiNucci said she didn’t realize the dinner was Trump’s first in a D.C. restaurant, she explained that, ”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 said of their protest, ”We were in there saying that he will absolutely not be able to have dinner in peace.”
