One small sign of where we are as a country is that officials down in Palm Beach County, Florida, are working through what they’ll do if Donald Trump is indicted in New York State while he’s residing at Mar-a-Lago. The presumption, I guess, is that he’ll be no more likely to willingly surrender to authorities than he was to surrender the White House.

In that scenario, Joe Abruzzo, the clerk of the Circuit Court of Palm Beach County, will have to open a fugitive-at-large case on a former president of the United States. Not only that, but he may have to contend with interference from Republican governor Ron DeSantis who has the power to intervene and “investigate whether an indicted ‘person ought to be surrendered‘ to law enforcement officials from another state.”

DeSantis is already emerging as a frontrunner of the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination, so he has some mixed interests with respect to Trump’s possible arrest. On the one hand, his main competition for the nomination is Trump, and if New York convicts and imprisons his rival that will ease DeSantis’s path. On the other hand, what better way to lose the support of the Republican base, which still overwhelmingly supports Trump, than to acquiesce in his extradition?

It’s not hard to picture the next January 6 MAGA mob emerging as a protection force to guard Mar-a-Lago and prevent Florida law enforcement from effecting the extradition. What would DeSantis do in that situation? I guess responsible officials in Palm Beach County understand that they have to prepare for a variety of contingencies.

This sounds far-fetched, but it’s really not. It might be closer to a certainty.

…the clock is ticking on the Manhattan D.A.’s investigation: On March 12, [Cyrus] Vance said in a statement that he will retire at the end of 2021, and speculation abounds that his office — which is currently investigating whether Trump and his businesses committed banking and tax fraud, among other lines of inquiry — could issue indictments before passing the case along to his successor.

The wildcard is that Trump doesn’t want to spend the summer in the sweltering heat of Florida and is preparing to move north to his Bedminster, New Jersey golf resort. He won’t have any protection against extradition from Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, so for Vance the prudent thing to do is to wait until Trump comes north to send down the indictments.

I’m sure DeSantis would greatly prefer that sequencing because otherwise he’s in a real Catch-22.

What a country.