Florida police recently arrested a transgender woman for using the women’s restroom in the state Capitol in Tallahassee, in what is believed to be the first such arrest in a state with an anti-trans bathroom ban.

Marcy Rheintgen, a 20-year-old college student and Illinois resident, was arrested March 19on a trespassing charge after she used a women’s restroom in a protest against Florida’s law barring people from using bathrooms that don’t align with their assigned sex at birth in government-owned or -leased buildings.

According to The Associated PressRheintgen had sent letters to every Florida state lawmaker to inform them that she planned to use a restroom at the statehouse that corresponded with her gender identity. She included a photo of herself for identification, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

“I know that you know in your heart that this law is wrong and unjust. I know that you know in your heart that transgender people are human too, and that you can’t arrest us away,” she wrote. “I know that you know that I have dignity. That’s why I know that you won’t arrest me.”

Jon Davidson, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, told the AP that Rheintgen’s arrest is the first of its kind that ACLU’s attorneys are aware of in any state with a bathroom ban.

Rheintgen, who the AP reported had been visiting her grandparents, was freed on pretrial release the day after her arrest, according to the Miami Herald. If convicted on the misdemeanor trespassing charge, she could face up to 60 days in jail.

Rheintgen told the AP that she wanted to show “the absurdity of this law in practice.”

“If I’m a criminal, it’s going to be so hard for me to live a normal life, all because I washed my hands,” she said, adding that she was “horrified and scared” over what might happen next.

Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, an LGBTQ civil rights organization, said in a statement that Rheintgen’s arrest was not about safety, but “about cruelty, humiliation, and the deliberate erosion of human dignity.”

“Transgender people have been using restrooms aligned with their gender for generations without incident,” Smith wrote. “What’s changed is not their presence — it’s a wave of laws designed to intimidate them out of public life.”

Florida is one of more than a dozen states with a bathroom banthough Utah is the only other state to criminalize the act. In recent years, GOP lawmakers across the country have passed legislation to crack down on trans rights and strip protections — a pattern that the Trump administration has mirrored on the federal level as well.

Clarissa-je Lim

Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking/trending news blogger for BLN Digital. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.

It was just five years ago when Donald Trumpworried about a re-election race he would ultimately lose, warned that his defeat would lead to economic ruin. In fact, with just a couple of weeks remaining before Election Day, the two major-party nominees faced off in their final debate, which included a rather specific prediction.

“They say the stock market will rule if I’m elected,” Trump saidfailing to identify who “they” might be. He added, in reference to Joe Biden: “If he’s elected, the stock market will crash.”

As it turns out, the Republican had the right concerns, but the wrong presidents. The major Wall Street indexes fared quite well throughout Biden’s term in the White House. Unfortunately for everyone, the Democrat’s Republican successor can’t say the same. NBC News reported:

We are not, of course, talking about a one-day sell-off. On the contrary, a day earlier — the day the White House unveiled its highly controversial policy on trade tariffs — the S&P had its worst day since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Nasdaq Composite is now down 22% from its high in December, and the S&P 500 is about 17% off its high in February.

Amid the downturn, the president — who left the White House for a Saudi-backed golf event in Florida — wrote to his social media platform“MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE.”

Evidently, that didn’t make investors feel any better.

To be sure, markets can fluctuate for all sorts of reasons, many of which are often outside the control of any one administration. But that’s precisely what makes the latest downturn so politically potent: You don’t have to be a financial genius to draw a straight line between stock market turmoil, Trump’s agenda and his public rhetoric.

Indeed, as the major indexes sink, it’s painfully obvious that in this game of “Clue,” it was the president, in the Oval Office, with his trade tariffs and layoffs.

Asked a month ago about the market losses that have happened after he returned to the White House, the president blamed “globalist countries” and “globalists that see how rich our country’s going to be and they don’t like it.” That was gibberish at the time, and it’s noticeably worse now.

But stepping back, the problem isn’t just that Trump is responsible for massive Wall Street losses, it’s also the fact that he promised to deliver the opposite results.

When markets soared during Biden’s presidency, the Republican repeatedly insisted that the major indexes were only up because investors expected Trump to return to the White House. It was part of a broader push: Trump told Americans to see the stock market as the one true metric that mattered more than any other.

“If [then-Vice President Kamala] Harris wins this election, the result will be a Kamala economic crash. … A 1929-style depression,” the Republican declared in August. “When I win the election, we will immediately begin a brand new Trump economic boom.”

In hindsight, perhaps “immediately” was the wrong choice of words.

Months later, as his inauguration neared, Trump vowed a Wall Street boomand as NBC News recently reportedthe rhetorical push continued as the president’s second term got underway.

Just 18 days after declaring, “The stock market is going to be great,” Trump appeared on Fox News and said: “You can’t really watch the stock market.”

The problem, of course, is that we can watch the stock market; we can recognize who’s responsible for these massive losses; and we can’t help but notice that Trump is golfing instead of trying to clean up his mess.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

Steve legs

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

Donald Trump, self-proclaimed “protector” of womenissued a proclamation Thursday acknowledging Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month, in which he leveled a bigoted attack against undocumented migrants.

The announcement began:

The rest of the screed offered more of the same.

Literally the only true statement in that quoted section is that April is in fact Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. There has not been an “invasion” of immigrants through our southern border. And despite Trump’s efforts to convince the public otherwise, studies have repeatedly shown immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S.

It’s perhaps not surprising that the president is less interested in bringing awareness to sexual assaults perpetrated by American citizens. Trump himself (as you likely know) was found liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a civil trial in 2023. He famously boasted about groping women without their consent.

Trump was once an associate of Jeffrey Epsteinthe late convicted sex offender (but he has never been implicated in any allegations). To serve as labor secretary in his first administration, Trump named Alex Acostathe former U.S. attorney who oversaw a controversial plea deal for Epstein in a child sex abuse case. Trump also publicly sent well-wishes to Ghislaine MaxwellEpstein’s co-defendant in his child sex trafficking case, as she fought the charges in 2020.

Three of the men Trump selected for Cabinet positions this year previously faced accusations of sexual assault (two denied any wrongdoing; the third apologized to the woman via text message). Multiple Jan. 6 insurrectionists he pardoned had prior convictions for sexual assault. And some of the insurrectionists he pardoned have since been charged with sexual assault or soliciting a minor in connection with incidents alleged to have occurred before the insurrection. And, according to reporting from the Financial Times and The TimesTrump’s administration had a hand in helping accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate return to the U.S. after the administration allegedly pressured Romanian officials to loosen travel restrictions for Tate and his brother.

So Trump’s proclamation Thursday — ostensibly “to support survivors of sexual assault” — tracks with his and his administration’s overtly racist policies. At the same time, it refuses any “awareness” of his own history of sexual abuse or the sexual misconduct alleged against those in his inner circle.

No one needs Trump to proclaim anything in support of Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month — unless it’s an apology.

Ja’han Jones

Ja’han Jones is an BLN opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. He is a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”