POV: Footlong Guy is the social media folk hero we need as Trump occupies Washington

There are many regional terms for a submarine-shaped sandwich. One of them is ‘hero.’

On Monday, as President Trump ordered 800 National Guard troops to descend upon the streets of Washington, D.C., plenty of social media users were using that term—not to describe such a sandwich, but the man who wielded it.

A viral video taken in D.C. over the weekend shows a man in a jaunty pink button-up and north-of-the-knee white shorts confronting heavily armed federal officers. He appears at first bouncing in and out of a slight crouch, his head swaying from side to side, looking spectacularly undaunted by the agents all around him. It’s unclear what he is saying, though a longer video shows the man ranting about “fascism” moments before the confrontation, so it’s easy to imagine what he may have been saying.

Soon enough, the man pulls back his arm to reveal, incredibly, an as-yet unglimpsed footlong Subway sub. He hurls the enormous sandwich at one of the officers, right in the chest, before breaking into a flat run. The video ends with the extremely confident, questionably athletic man seeming to evade capture, though subsequent photos suggest he was later apprehended.

The federal takeover of D.C. is something Trump had been threatening since at least August 5, after a former member of DOGE—Ed “Big Balls” Coristine—was beaten up by two 15-year olds in an attempted carjacking. “If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly,” the president wrote on Truth Social following the attack, “We will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore.”

Considering he’d previously dispatched National Guard troops to Los Angeles just two months ago, it was clear this was no idle threat. Sure enough, Trump eventually sent agents from the DEA, FBI, and ATF into the city late last week, ahead of Monday’s press conference announcing a deployment of the National Guard and his taking control of the Metropolitan police department, putting its 3,100 officers under his direct command for at least 30 days.

For much of Monday, social media users shared surreal footage of DEA officers in tactical gear patrolling the leafy walkway of the National Mall as joggers jogged by. It served as a counterpoint to the doomsday dirge on conservative media, with one GOP senator after another talking about how unsafe and scary they find Washington, D.C. The emerging footage seemed to instead reflect data collected by the Metropolitan police department showing that violent crime in the city last year was down 35% from 2023, and at its lowest level in over 30 years.

And that was before Bluesky and Reddit got a better look at some of that violent criminal element—in the form of assault with a hoagie. That’s when the jokes and memes began.

Most social media users weren’t necessarily cheering for the battery of police officers, but rather admiring the assailant’s fearlessness and laughing at his choice of projectile. Beaning an authority figure with a footlong sub, after all, seems more like a means of conveying disrespect and creating a spectacle than inflicting injury.

In any case, whether because the man gave voice to their own lack of respect toward the deployed feds, or just because it gave them a much-needed laugh, users on Bluesky and Reddit quickly elevated Footlong Guy to folk hero status—a sort of non-homocidal Luigi Mangione, or way-less violent Waymo-destoyer.

Upon learning that the unidentified man had indeed been caught, Blueskiers imagined his arraignment—“hot or sweet peppers?” “both, your honor”—and speculated about how much it would cost to secure the defendant’s release—“Bail is set at $5 footlong.”

Some of them went a step further, creating logos portraying the submarine sandwich as an object of resistance and its tosser as an icon.

In its almost objectively silly insouciance, the sub-tosser seemed to make the D.C. streets, and the federal presence now patrolling them, appear less threatening. Some on social media joked, though, about how he could be framed to make those already scared of D.C. even more afraid.

Those jokes ultimately proved prescient. By Tuesday morning, large accounts on X were scaremongering about Footlong Guy, with some even describing his hoagie toss as insurrection. However, it’s the very imbalance between those now-pardoned protesters who beat cops with a flagpole during the Capitol Riots and the chucking of a sandwich that makes Footlong Guy so potent as a symbol. He fits in snugly among other Bluesky memes about how “terrifying” D.C. is.

Like recent episodes of the reinvigorated South Park and the newly cancelled Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Footlong Guy shows the power of being able to laugh at the powerful.

Not all heroes eat fresh, but this one did.