Good morning. It is June 3rd. The sun is out in New York City and it is going to be a hot day. And this is your Indignity Morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Skoka, taking a look at the day and the news. Claudia Scheinbaum won the presidency of Mexico in a landslide as voters chose continuity with the outgoing president, Manuel Lopez Obrador, and his leftist program. The Times managed to write an entire story about how Scheinbaum will be the first woman president of Mexico and about the voters affirmation of the work of the current administration without mentioning the name of her political party, Moreno, describing it simply as López Obrador's party and the election as a referendum on his popularity, while also calling him deeply polarizing, given that he wasn't on the ticket and that the current returns have shine -bombed with 58 .8 % of the vote, more than doubling up the next candidate.

It seems like that might be a narrow and reductive window for understanding the current state of Mexican politics. ProPublica has an investigation this morning reporting nine witnesses in the criminal cases against former president Donald Trump have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares in cash from Trump's media company. It's a good story. The question is why it's coming from ProPublica in June of the election year, rather than from the feds in a criminal indictment long ago, particularly given that one of the figures isn't a revelation at all. It's Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, who, as ProPublica Rights, got a $2 million severance agreement in January 2023, four months after the New York attorney general sued Trump for financial fraud in his real estate business. The agreement contains a non -disparagement clause and language barring Weisselberg from voluntarily cooperating with investigators. The story continues, it came up in Trump's hush money trial last month when prosecutors told the judge that the severance agreement was one of the reasons they would not call Weisselberg. He would still do several payments. This was all in the public record, but somehow the justice system's response to Trump openly buying off a witness was to have everyone shake their head and say what a shame it was that they couldn't get that witness. The thing about obstruction of justice is as Trump has demonstrated, it's pretty effective at obstructing justice. On the front of this morning's paper, New York Times, two columns in the top right, lead news spot, are given over to a news analysis piece by Peter Baker. If a president is a felon, who can stop him? As Peter Baker discovers that checks and balances don't actually work against a determined criminal.

Whatever rules Americans thought were in place are now being rewritten by Donald J. Trump, the once and perhaps future president who has already shattered many barriers and precedents. Baker writes, now, now Trump is exposing the limits of our system. Not like on inauguration day, when he started harvesting bribes at the hotel in DC that the law said he couldn't possibly be allowed to operate. Not when he put out a stack of blank paper to show how he was divesting. is companies because he wasn't divesting. Anyway, welcome to the conversation, Peter Baker. Below that is once a creature of New York, Trump has become its pariah. New York City was once tunnel J. Trump's playground, the Times writes, the place where he made his name and then plastered it everywhere he could. Now the city that helped make him rich and famous has become his battleground. And Mr. Trump keeps losing. Once again, now doesn't really seem to be the word for this.

It's been nearly eight years since they tore down the big shiny letters spelling Trump from the buildings on Riverside Boulevard. And it's not as if the Trump brand was a really big selling point in New York City before that. This is pretty much the first place, or after Atlantic City, the second place, where everybody understood that he was a fraud and a bum. Below that, in the lower right, Hunter Biden's trial begins today on gun charges. The spectacle of Hunter Biden's trial, the Times' rights, and its timing.

creates significant headaches for President Biden's campaign as it seeks to maximize the effect of Mr. Trump's conviction without the distraction of having a family member on trial days after Mr. Trump was officially designated a felon. If only there were some sort of neutral institutions that could weight the difference between a presidential candidate's felony convictions and a presidential candidate's child's potential convictions and give each one the emphasis that it deserves. Down below the jump on the Hunter Biden story. On page 814, there's one little column about how 25 people were shot in Akron, Ohio, late Saturday night. There was only one fatality. So the 24 other people with gunshot wounds are no biggie. That is the news. I'm going to break the usual cadence here to say, for real, if you listen to the podcast and you aren't already a paid subscriber to Indignity, please do go click that button.

It's not really practicable to slap a paywall on the audio, but subscriber dollars are the only thing that pays for these morning sessions at the microphone. Thank you for your interest and for your support. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.