Donald Trump faced protesters shouting “Free DC! Free Palestine! Trump is the Hitler of our time!” as he dined at a Washington restaurant, videos posted online showed.
The US president approached the shouting protesters in the restaurant, pausing a few feet away from them for a few moments, nodding and smiling without offering a response.
Seconds later, Trump gestured for the area to be cleared out, saying “come on, let’s go.”
Secret Service agents then moved the protesters, who waved Palestinian flag. Others in the restaurant can be heard booing or chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!”
Code Pink, a feminist activist group, claimed credit for the protest. “While Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth and others feasted at a steakhouse, we stood our ground and told them the truth: Free DC. Free Palestine. Trump is the Hitler of our time,” they wrote on social media.
Trump had dinner on Tuesday at a seafood restaurant near the White House, promoting his deployment of the national guard and federalizing the police force in the nation’s capital.
His traveled the short distance to Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak + Stone Crab on 15th Street in the Northwest quadrant of the city after weeks of the president boasting about mobilizing federal authorities and the military that he says have made Washington “a safe zone”.
Cheers were heard as the president stepped out of his limo, along with a smattering of boos and chants from protesters opposing US policy in support of Israel in its war with Hamas in Gaza.
“We’re standing right in the middle of DC, which as you know about, over the last year, was a very unsafe place – over the last 20 years – and now it’s got virtually no crime,” Trump told reporters.
He added that he would not have stood out “in the middle of the street” as recently as a couple of months ago.
Eating dinner in public is a rare event for Trump, but Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, confirmed that he “and his team enjoyed crab, shrimp, salad, steak and dessert” for dinner at a restaurant blocks from the White House.
Trump was joined by JD Vance, the vice-president, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, Leavitt and others.
Ahead of the meal, Trump told press “the restaurants now are booming” in DC, crediting his crackdown on the capital with national guard troops.
In one video, Vance is seen shaking diners’ hands and telling them to enjoy their meal.
In August, Vance was heckled while handing out hamburgers to national guard troops in DC, with one man calling him a “Nazi”.
Crime in DC was at a 30-year low when Trump sent in several thousand troops anyway.
Related: ‘It’s not safe to exist in DC as an immigrant’: 30 days of Trump’s Washington military takeover
Although arrests have increased in the city since then, a Reuters analysis showed federal agents have been “converging in large numbers on low-level crimes such as marijuana use and public alcohol consumption”.
More than half of the cases federal agents were involved in were minor offenses, and authorities have struggled to make more serious gun and drug-related charges stick, with an unprecedented rate of grand juries finding not enough evidence to indict in the first few weeks of the takeover.
