Good morning. It is February 18th. It is a cold, bright morning in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

And the news did not in any way observe the federal holiday yesterday, but continued piling up at an unconscionable rate. The lead news spot in this morning's New York Times is two columns wide. “Four New York Officials Quitting Over Alliance Of Adams and Trump / Concerns Over a Mayor’s Ability to Lead.”  The New York Post went more sharply, if prematurely, with “FALL FROM GRACIE” as the wood, which really would be the headline when, or if, New York Mayor Eric Adams is removed from his job. The Times writes, “Four top New York City officials said they would resign after the Justice Department moved to dismiss Mayor Eric Adams’s corruption case in apparent exchange for his help with President Trump’s deportation agenda. The four officials — Maria Torres-Springer, the first deputy mayor, and Meera Joshi, Anne Williams-Isom and Chauncey Parker, all also deputy mayors — oversee much of New York City government, and their departure is poised to blow a devastating hole in Mr. Adams’s already wounded administration.
Increasingly,” the Times writes, “the deputy mayors felt that they were not merely working for an indicted mayor, but for someone whose personal interests risked outweighing the interests of New Yorkers, according to one person briefed on the matter. They found this untenable, the person said.” 

But the story really showcases the awkwardness of the Times' struggle to show it cares about New York City or that it cares about the print edition, as despite giving the story such prominent treatment, the Times failed to incorporate any of the whole other stories worth of breaking news about the condition of the Adams administration that it published yesterday. People who get their news from the print edition alone would have no idea that city council speaker Adrian Adams, who the Times described as one of Mayor Eric Adams's principal partners in government, had called for Adams's resignation, or that Governor Kathy Hochul is supposed to be meeting with officials today to talk about whether to remove Adams, or that Comptroller Brad Lander announced that he would convene the Committee of Mayoral Inability as an emergency measure, if Adams doesn't offer him a contingency plan for keeping the city running by Friday. Helpful things to know about the state of the city, but maybe not on a holiday print deadline. 

Anyway, news, news, news, news, news. The rest of the top of the front page is taken up by a four column picture of someone cleaning up the damage from catastrophic flooding in Kentucky. The follow up story on that is inside on A14. 

Then there's “Trump Casts Wide Net in Pursuit of Retribution / Delivering on Promises Against Growing List of Perceived Foes.” 

“Through the first month of his administration,” the Times writes, “Mr. Trump and his allies have carried out a campaign of revenge and retribution that has little analog in American history.” Congratulations on the use of American in that construction. He has, the Times writes “pulled protective details from former colleagues facing death threats from Iran. He has revoked or threatened to revoke the security clearances of former President Joe Biden, members of his administration and dozens of others. His administration has taken steps to target members of the news media seen as unfriendly, taking the hatchet to entire agencies perceived as too liberal, and fired or investigated government workers deemed disloyal.” The Times continues, “asked why he was going after the security clearances of Mr. Biden and others. Mr. Trump was characteristically blunt. ‘There are people that we don't respect,’ he told reporters recently. ‘If there are people that we thought were breaking the law, came very close to it in previous years, we do it.’” I’d quibble slightly with the framing of Trump being “characteristically blunt” because one important part of what's going on here is that Trump's characteristics have changed over time and first term Donald Trump had a sort of mafioso's approach to indirection and dissimulation about how he might abuse his powers. The current Donald Trump is disinhibited about stuff like this and has basically given up on exercising any form of impulse control.

There's an open question how much of the current slide into overt authoritarianism is just a reflection of Trump not having the mental capacity to express himself in non-authoritarian ways anymore. One other note on the story. When it talks about what's happening in the larger sphere of Trump world, it says “conservative groups picking up on Mr. Trump's penchant for retribution have rallied around the theme. One nonprofit posted the names and photos of more than 50 federal workers on what it is calling a ‘watch list,’ related to diversity, equity and inclusion, asking President Trump to fire them. Many of the targets are black workers at health agencies.” Space is tight and you don't want to go too far afield, but given that the Times has reported in the past about what this nonprofit is, and to the American Accountability Foundation, founded with the help of Stephen Miller, backed by Heritage Foundation grant money, and run by an operative named Thomas Jones, it seems weird not to go ahead and put a name on the racist organization that puts such great stock in its own naming and shaming efforts. 

If these abuses of power sound terrible and you're wishing that someone would do something about it, you have to flip the paper over. Page A18 has “Thousands gather in rallies on President's Day to call Trump a tyrant.”

“Thousands of protesters opposing broad swaths of President Trump's agenda took to the streets across the United States on Monday, calling Mr. Trump a king on President's Day for his efforts to terminate thousands of federal workers and to fire prosecutors and independent watchdogs in the federal government.” The reporting starts in Washington, but also checks in on the thousands of people in Union Square in New York, while also giving details on the protests in Nantucket, Roanoke, Virginia, Sacramento, Little Rock, Atlanta, and Austin. 

Back on page one, below the fold, in West Bank, “Israel's tactics cause exodus.” A look at how what Israel claims is a military operation against militant forces in the West Bank has somehow strictly accidentally, collaterally displaced 40,000 people from their homes. In the Times writes, “what historians and researchers say is the biggest displacement of civilians in the territory since the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. The Israeli military,” the Times writes, “has demolished scores of buildings in the areas it has invaded, ripping up roads, water pipes, and power lines to destroy what it says are booby traps set by militants.” Because one place you definitely want to plant explosives is on your own drinking water system. 

A small story on page A5 seems to harbor the potential to become a big story on page one. Pope Francis, age 88, is in the hospital with what the Vatican calls a “polymicrobial respiratory tract infection.” An infectious disease expert consulted by the Times said it is usually not a good sign, because healthy people seldom get such infections. 

Back on page one, below the fold, for visual interest, there's a photograph of the airplane or the remains of the airplane that tried to land at Toronto yesterday and ended up upside down, somehow without killing any of the people aboard. The story of the crash is on page A7 in a de facto Canadian news package with a psychotic White House memo from Peter Baker. “Canada as 51st state favors Democrats.” About how if you were to take seriously Donald Trump's stated plan to conquer our northern neighbor, “The results of that conquest could also undercut his own party's prospect.” Sure. Yes, if the existing contours of the American bipartisan system were to pass intact through whatever sequence of events would produce the subjugation of Canada and Canada's political alignment were in turn to maintain its basic setup and correspondences with its American political counterparts and elections were to be held—and why are you doing this? Why are you writing and running a White House memo that's supposed to be one more clever thought experiment about what if Donald Trump's fascist imperialist project could imaginably in some narrow respect turn out not to be entirely all bad? It seems like there are a few things going on at the White House that might be more directly worth writing about. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going with your paid subscriptions and your tips. Thank you, and please continue to send those. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.