Good morning. It's May 31st. It's a sunny morning in New York City. Yesterday's chill is lifting. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. And the big news in the morning paper is what everyone went to bed knowing it would be. A one -word headline. Guilty. Sitting across the entire front page of the Times. Subheadline. Jury convicts Trump on all 34 counts. Four columns of frowning photo two columns of news, G -U -I -L -T -Y. And the same two column news space below the fold is an unusually useful political memo piece, not because it offers any particularly profound analysis, but because it just puts it all down in one place. As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan write that the four criminal cases that threatened Trump's freedom were stumbling along so badly that his advisors were often incredulous at his good fortune.

In the Florida case, they write, in which he was charged with obstruction of justice and unlawfully holding on to classified documents, a Trump -nominated judge had spent so much time puzzling over minor issues that the trial would almost certainly be delayed beyond the presidential election in November. In the Georgia case, the prosecutor who had charged Mr. Trump as part of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election was caught in a romantic affair with the man she had hired to help her prosecute Mr. Trump.

And with the federal charges over his efforts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, the Supreme Court has significantly narrowed the chances of a trial before the election, having taken up the presidential immunity arguments put forth by Mr. Trump's lawyers. The choice to describe this as Trump's good fortune is a little bit too generous. The underlying issue is that while all the big -brained pundits and experts on federal law were holding forth on New York laws that they didn't understand,

The federal court system was revealing itself to be too corrupt and ineffectual to deal with the entire problem of a criminal ex -president. There was some luck involved, and particularly bad luck, in the classified documents case landing with Judge Alien Cannon in particular. But the fact that there was a completely incompetent federal judge in the tank for Donald Trump, sitting there and waiting, was the result of the long running coordinated right -wing campaign.

to reshape the federal judiciary, as is the fact that the Supreme Court has three members who were appointed by Donald Trump and two other members whose spouses have been openly partial to Trump. Speaking of which, on page A11, the Times checks back in on the Samuel Alito flag scandal. Experts question Alito's refusal to recuse himself, takes up four columns of the lower half of the page, and the other two columns are...

Roberts won't compel justice to refrain from January 6th cases about how John Roberts told the Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats that they had no power to ask for a leader's recusal and that it was frankly partisan of them to ask that the court rein in a partisan justice. That story does not include the detail that Roberts's letter, piously setting himself and his court above petty partisanship, was cc'd to Lindsey Graham and John Kennedy a sly little jape there by the Chief Justice about how he knows full well which team he's on. Back on A1, down below the fold, in the bottom right corner, Biden allows Ukraine to use US arms to strike in Russia. The Times writes that the administration described the decision as a narrow one. But the story says, having reversed his position, even in limited circumstances, Mr. Biden has clearly crossed a red line that he himself drew.

And speaking of red lines, the Times website is reporting in its live news feed, the Israeli military said on Friday that its forces had advanced into central Rafa, pushing even deeper into the southern Gaza city, despite an international backlash and pressure from allies to scale back the latest offensive. Israeli commandos backed by tanks and artillery were operating in central Rafa, the Israeli military said in a statement without specifying precise locations.

The report goes on, commercially available satellite imagery taken by Planet Labs on Thursday also showed that the Israeli military had set up positions in parts of central Ra 'afah, while military vehicles and tanks could be spotted as far as the outskirts of the Tal Al -Sultan area in western Ra 'afah. but are they marching in columns yet? If they're not in columns, it still doesn't count as the major ground offensive that the Biden administration told them they were not allowed to do. And in other news from the Manhattan DA's office,

On page 813, the owner of Grimaldi's Pizzeria and the manager of the restaurant's Manhattan location pleaded guilty to stealing more than $32 ,000 in wages from 18 employees by bouncing checks and sometimes by not paying workers at all, prosecutors announced on Wednesday. That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please enjoy this beautiful day and a pretty good -looking weekend forecast. And if all goes well, we will talk again on Monday.