Every Detail About Donald Trump’s Motorcade to New York for His Indictment Was Perfect

Donald Trump headed to the airport Monday to fly to New York for his arraignment in a motorcade that was 11 cars long.

Trump became the first former president ever to be criminally charged last week, when a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict him for his role in paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels. He is due to be arraigned in a Manhattan court on Tuesday.

He headed up ahead of time with a perfectly reasonable number of cars in tow.

And since Twitter is not broken yet (despite Elon Musk’s best efforts), the internet had some jokes. Many people were quick to note that there was one white SUV among the black ones and drew a comparison to another infamous celebrity run-in with the law.

Some Trump supporters lined the road to show support for the former president, but as Fox News inadvertently pointed out, some of them were also law enforcement officers to prevent the “death & destruction” Trump called for.

Trump’s adviser Dan Scavino and son Eric Trump both posted videos that showed a thick crowd of fans. But network aerial coverage showed that the crowd was fairly sparse.

Most people were just confused about why Trump needed 11 SUVs to get him to the airport.

This post has been updated.

The Florida Senate passed a bill Monday banning abortion after six weeks, a measure that is expected to quickly and easily become law.

Senate Bill 300 passed by a vote of 26–13. The bill prohibits abortion after six weeks, down from 15 weeks and before many people even know they are pregnant. It makes exceptions for rape, incest, fetal abnormalities, or to save the pregnant person’s life. However, two doctors have to agree the abortion was “necessary,” and the patient “must provide a copy of a restraining order, police report, medical record, or other court order or documentation proving” they were the victim of rape or incest.

“I know many of you fundamentally believe abortion is wrong. So guess what? No one is forcing you to have an abortion,” said Senator Tina Polsky. “But don’t tell me, my daughters, and all the daughters of Florida that they can’t do that if it’s right for them.”

A similar bill was introduced in the House of Representatives in early March and is still in committee hearings. Republicans hold a supermajority in the state legislature, and they and Governor Ron DeSantis are unlikely to face much opposition in their attempts to make the near-total abortion ban a reality.

The bill passed Monday would also ban individuals, government agencies, and public education institutions from using state funds to help someone travel out of state for an abortion, unless it is medically necessary to save the pregnant person’s life, or unless those groups are already legally required to use federal funds for such aid.

The bill would also lower the amount of money that the state Department of Health is required to spend on pregnancy and parental support services to 85 percent, down from 90 percent. These services include pregnancy testing, counseling, prenatal classes, adoption education, and material aid such as diapers and formula. Abortion rights advocates regularly point out that states with some of the toughest abortion laws often fail to set up social welfare systems to support children after they are born. People can currently receive such support for up to a year after the child is born. The bill removes that element.

The measure removes the clause that specifically states abortion regulations “may not impose an unconstitutional burden on a woman’s freedom to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy,” specifically stripping away people’s autonomy.

The vote was temporarily delayed when protesters shouted at Republican senators that “people will die” if the abortion ban is passed. The chamber took a 10-minute recess while security cleared the gallery.

If it becomes law, as it is expected to, S.B. 300 will have a significant negative effect across the rest of the South. Florida currently allows abortion up to 15 weeks and has become an abortion haven in the region, as many neighboring states have imposed harsher restrictions on the procedure since Roe v. Wade was overturned.

On Monday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis quietly signed a bill to allow people to carry concealed loaded guns without any permits, training, or background checks.

The change, the execution of a promise DeSantis had repeatedly made in the past, comes after it passed the state legislative chambers largely on party lines.

Florida now becomes the twenty-sixth state to allow permitless concealed carry. One study found states that pass such laws experience a 22 percent increase in gun homicide during the three years after the law’s passage.

The bill was first introduced in late January, and just hours later, a mass shooting in Lakeland, Florida, left 11 people injured. Now the bill’s passage comes in the wake of a school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, that left three children and three adults dead.

The timing, as well as the mass unpopularity of gun deregulation amid what is now a continual cycle of mass shootings, explains why DeSantis passed it with little fanfare (compared to the ceremony he exhibits when signing bills like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, for example).

But, as with most changes Republicans pursue nowadays, permitless carry is massively unpopular.

A December poll showed 68 percent of voters in Miami-Dade opposing permitless carry,  including 65 percent of registered Republicans and 60 percent of voters who said they voted for DeSantis in November.

Moreover, once voters were told explicitly that the now-signed bill would allow anyone who can purchase a gun to carry it in public, opposition grew by 12, to 80 percent—with 81 percent of Hispanics and 69 percent of DeSantis voters being opposed to such a policy. And cutting against the bipartisan crime panic, more respondents attributed crime to lax gun laws than to a lack of police funding.

Another poll conducted last September yielded similar results, with 61 percent of Floridian voters opposed to permitless carry, including 71 percent of Hispanic voters.

Still—despite the unpopularity and the material threats such a bill introduces to his own people, all after yet another horrific mass shooting—DeSantis has now made it even easier for people to carry guns and schoolchildren to get murdered.

Thousands of students in Nashville staged a walkout Monday to demand stronger gun control laws, a week after a shooter killed six people at a grade school.

A shooter opened fire at the Covenant School last week, killing three children and three adults and wounding several others. State Republicans have insisted that there is nothing they could have done or could do differently to prevent such a tragedy.

Thousands of students marched to the state Capitol building, chanting for more gun regulations. Local reporter Chris O’Brien estimated there were 2,500 to 3,000 people there. Gun control organization March for Our Lives put the number at more than twice as many.

They rallied outside the building, where they sang songs and called on lawmakers to protect them. “We all just want to live through high school,” one student said.

The students passed out a flyer with their list of demands, which include a red flag law, safe storage laws, and a ban on permitless carrying.

The protest comes just days after thousands of people, including students, rallied at the state Capitol building to protest Tennessee gun regulations.

Protesters marched inside the Capitol ahead of the House and Senate regular floor sessions on Thursday, calling for gun control and for lawmakers to “protect our kids!”

Governor Bill Lee and his fellow Republicans have carefully evaded the fact that they helped create the circumstances that allowed the shooting to occur. The GOP holds a supermajority in the Tennessee legislature, as well as the governor’s office.

Two years ago, lawmakers failed to pass a red flag law that would have prevented the shooter from legally acquiring seven guns, three of which were used in the attack. In the past few years, Republicans also loosened gun restrictions, focusing instead on attacking LGBTQ rights.

This post has been updated.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has called for a “national divorce”; lied about the 2020 election; spread conspiracy theories about 9/11, the 2018 Parkland shooting, and Jewish space lasers setting forests on fire in California; and repeatedly expressed support for fatal violence against Democrats.

And she was given an open platform on 60 Minutes.

On Sunday, the radical member of Congress joined CBS’s Lesley Stahl for an exclusive and much-promoted interview special, in which the duo were seen walking the halls of Congress and Greene was filmed showing off her CrossFit skills.

Aside from the odd “day in the life” aesthetic of the interview, Stahl’s interview of Greene, and perhaps CBS’s edits of it, displayed a shocking deference to the Georgia congresswoman and her dangerous ideas. One moment in particular embodied the shortcomings of the interview: just enough pushback to show an effort, not enough to prove that the effort meant anything at all.

Stahl asked Greene about things she has said in the past, like: “The Democrats are a party of pedophiles.”

“I would definitely say so,” Greene affirmed. “They support grooming children.”

“They are not pedophiles,” Stahl responded. “Why would you say that?”

“Democrats, Democrats support—even Joe Biden, the president himself, supports children being sexualized and having transgender surgeries,” Greene said. “Sexualizing children is what pedophiles do to children.”

“Wow. OK,” Stahl responded. “But my question really is, why can’t you fight for what you believe in without all that name-calling and without the personal attacks?”

That Stahl was unprepared to more directly confront for a major talking point among Republicans, and that she reduced their attacks on trans kids and gender-affirming care to “name-calling,” speaks volumes about the folly of the entire interview.

After an ensuing back-and-forth about name-calling, Stahl offered to move on. “Let me button this up, and we’ll move on,” she said, before asking about Greene’s hopes to bring America closer to her views, which include instituting a Christian government, banning abortion nationally, defunding the FBI, and stopping immigration for four years.

Stahl focused on the former. “The Constitution, the very First Amendment, prohibits having a religion in the government,” she pointed out.

“Yet the Founding Fathers quoted the Bible constantly and were driven by their faith,” Greene responded, somehow with the production leaving that as the last word.

The interview concludes almost like a foreboding movie trailer.

“As a fervent supporter of the now-indicted Donald Trump, she was a featured speaker at his rally in Waco last weekend. While she’s adored here, the latest national poll has her approval rating at just 29 percent,” a following voice-over read.

A clip of Trump follows.

“Marjorie Taylor Greene, you happened to be here,” Trump says. “Would you like to run for the Senate? I will fight like hell for you, I’ll tell ya.”

“The question for her, and the country, is can she expand her brash MTG brand beyond the right-wing, populist base?” the voice-over finishes.

This half-critical, half-not approach characterized much of the interview. “Before Congress, she helped run the family construction company in Georgia,” the interview’s voice-over read in another part of the special on Greene. It continued, describing her as “known to be smart and fearless and has a history of believing in conspiracy theories.” Why, exactly, she is characterized as “smart”—and by whom—is not completely clear. And in a broader sense, calling Green “smart and fearless” is like calling The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns “resourceful and bold.”

The production overall was too willing to move on, offering mere samplings of Greene’s issues paired with a touch of pushback. It embodied the sort-of journalism that insists on its merit by arguing that the best spokesperson for showing the wrongness of something is itself, rather than another observer explaining why exactly it is wrong. Stahl doesn’t need to actually interrogate the absurdity or danger of something Greene says; she just needs to push back once to show the contrast, and then the viewers can just see for themselves.

In some sense, the production felt like a time-warp back to 2016; the special was a piece built for intrigue, a self-proclaimed holistic examination into someone who is neither intriguing nor enigmatic. And though it should be needless to say, apparently it is not: Providing such room for complexity about someone so simply unfit to represent this country is exactly how we got Donald Trump—and exactly how we’ll keep getting more like him (heck, maybe even more of him).