A Manhattan couple said “I do” as a former president said “I didn’t” to 34 felony charges Tuesday.
Chandler Dean, 27, and Carolina Treviño, 28, tied the knot at the Manhattan City Clerk’s Office, just around the corner from the criminal court where former President Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned.
But it wasn't the screaming of protesters or hordes of reporters that Dean first recalls on his way to be married. Instead, Dean remembered the uncharacteristically nice weather Tuesday as he and his-now wife emerged from the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall/Chambers Street station on their way to the clerk's office.
Once in line, with the other couples also waiting to be married, the reality of the day settled in.
“For a minute, while we were waiting for our witnesses to gather, we just kind of soaked in the situation and just saw all the people standing around, just appreciated the absurdity of it all before we went into what felt like a totally perfunctory day inside the city clerk’s office,” Dean told USA TODAY.
Despite the chaos outside prompted by Trump's arraignment, the clerk's office was business as usual.
It was “like all the pomp and circumstance of the DMV,” Dean said of obtaining the couple's marriage license.
An arraigned marriage
When news of Trump’s arraignment first dropped, the couple didn’t think much of it, assuming it would be over by the time they headed to the clerk’s office. However, as they shouted the details to one another from across their shared New York City apartment as new information trickled out, they realized that wasn't the case.
“For whatever reason, we thought this was the sort of thing that might happen early in the day,” Dean said. “But then we saw it was happening at 2:15 and that was when we realized that it was just going to be crashing into each other.”
The couple considered rescheduling their upcoming nuptials – but only for a moment. Short of the city deciding to reschedule the appointment over security concerns, Dean and Treviño were determined to follow through with their legal ceremony.
Couple sees Trump as 'such an irrelevant and unimportant person'
“If anything, there’s something in our determination to stay on the day. This is such an irrelevant and unimportant person to be intervening on our plans. I think we were really happy to go through with it and we saw the humor of the situation and we were willing to embrace it,” Dean said. “There was almost something amusing about letting it happen the way it was going to happen.”
And there was a lot to be amused by.
The couple also found the media frenzy surrounding the Manhattan courts to be a positive as it attracted more attention toward their planned nuptial – whether celebratory or not.
A friend sent the couple a video of a protester screaming on the streets of Manhattan featuring a caption stating, “One of the worst days in history to have a courthouse wedding.” In the background, posing for pictures, were a beaming Dean and Treviño.
“To us, that’s fun,” Dean said. “Imagining a world where we have kids or other family that we’d want to tell about the story about us getting married, being able to look back at it with all this documentation is a positive thing for us.”
Dean and Treviño are planning to have a more formal ceremony with friends and family later this month in their hometown of Houston. Their honeymoon will be in Mexico – not at a Trump hotel or resort.
“There will be, I would say, zero Trump affiliation for the remainder of our nuptial plans,” Dean added.
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