Good morning. It is July 26th. It is a warm, pleasant morning in New York City. The humidity is dropping. The washing machine is running in the background to get some clothes clean while they can be hung up and dried successfully. I don't know what the helicopter that just showed up is for, but I hope it goes away soon, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

It's Olympics time, the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics begins at 1:30 Eastern Time today and will be butchered and rebroadcast on NBC in prime time tonight. On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news story, “Harris narrows gap with Trump, new poll shows.” That's the Times tallying its own poll with Siena College finding that Vice President Kamala Harris has wiped out five points of the six point deficit that Joe Biden had behind Donald Trump, with Trump 48, Harris 47, among likely voters. Harris takes the lead if you throw Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the mix instead of running it head to head. The poll analysis inside the paper includes the disturbing fact that Trump's favorability is at 48%, the highest it's ever been in the time Siena poll.

Relatedly perhaps, on A16 is the story “Since Biden dropped out, Trump has been fighting for media attention,” as the Times reports on a phenomenon while also creating the phenomenon. On the one hand, Donald Trump has lost his juice and is old and boring. On the other hand, that means that people are being spared the constant reminder of just how juiceless he is, and just how tired everyone is of seeing him and losing their focus on how incredibly unpleasant it would be to have him dominating the news again for another four years. 

Back on page one, the number two news story is “Major donors leap to fund vice president Obama -like moment after a rapid ascent.” Right now, the Times just can't get enough of talking about how much everyone loves Kamala Harris. Then comes the story of how California governor Gavin Newsom, having seen his presidential aspirations and, thanks to the Constitution's requirement that more than one state be represented on the ticket, his vice presidential aspirations, thwarted by Kamala Harris, is now focusing on abusing the homeless now that the right -wing Supreme Court majority has given its blessing to his desire to bust up the homeless encampments around his state. “More than in any other state, homeless encampments have been a wrenching issue in California,” the Times writes, “where housing costs are among the nation's highest, complicating the many other factors that contribute to homelessness,” which is a mighty strange way to stumble around the fact that what causes homelessness is people not having homes. Generations of California policy have encouraged housing scarcity, and now it's illegal to live in a tent. So the tents will go and people will go somewhere. You know, not the Supreme Court's or the Democratic governor's and mayor's concern. 

And then down below the fold at the bottom right is the extremely juicy media news story that the Times dropped two nights ago. “Murdoch family secretly fights over future of its media empire,” having created an irrevocable family trust for his four children to oversee the family media empire, Hubert Murdoch is now trying to make it a little bit revocable for fear that three out of the four children might use the power he granted them to turn Fox into something other than a naked partisan propaganda machine. Although the whole point of the trust was supposed to be to prevent him from meddling with the children's preferences. Rupert Murdoch wants to tip the scale in favor of his true believer, child Lachlan, who he put in charge of his companies, on the grounds that the right -wing nature of Fox News is not simply an expression of his and Lachlan's own odious personal views, but is a necessary commercial characteristic of the properties without which the economic value of the family's holdings would be damaged. So he’s doing this for the other children's own good, even though they're unappreciative. The story abounds with trashy Murdoch family detail. The three children he's trying to muscle aside refused to attend his wedding to his fifth wife last month. Rupert Murdoch has named his effort to force three of his children to submit to their brother's minority control as Project Harmony. But probably the funniest detail of all comes low down in the piece, “To bolster his argument that he's making the changes in order to benefit all of his heirs,” the Times writes, “Mr. Murdoch has moved to replace two of his longtime executives as his personal representatives on the trust with two people with more independence. One is William P. Barr, an attorney general under Presidents George H .W. Bush and Trump, who was also a guest at Mr. Trump's most recent wedding.” If there is one person you really want to help you prove that you're not doing something for an ulterior political motive, who better than Bill Barr? 

Speaking of whom, hey, look, it's page A15. “Watchdog criticizes Barr's role in ballot case. It was an incident,” the Times writes, “that seemed to bolster President Donald J. Trump's claim that election workers were scheming against him. In September 2020, the Justice Department announced it was investigating the dumping of pro -Trump absentee ballots in Pennsylvania. But prosecutors quickly determined it was an innocent error. A mentally impaired seasonal elections employee had mistakenly believed that nine ballots were invalid and tossed them in a dumpster. Yet the fact that no charges would be brought was not made public until well after Joseph R. Biden Jr. defeated Mr. Trump. On Thursday,” the story continues, “nearly four years later, the Justice Department's in -house watchdog issued a scathing report criticizing the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, and David Fried, then a Trump -appointed U .S. attorney in Pennsylvania, for publicly disclosing a continuing criminal investigation and allowing a mistaken perception of the incident to linger during an election. The Inspector General, Michael E. Horowitz, said he was particularly troubled by Mr. Barr's decision to brief Mr. Trump on the inquiry, which in turn might have encouraged him to make false and exaggerated claims about election security.” A helpful and essential reminder there, that before Bill Barr turned into a witness against Donald Trump in the January 6th inquiry, he was an active participant in the long -term plan to try to steal the election, spending the summer and early fall doing everything he could to mislead the public about the threat of election fraud, to create a favorable climate for Donald Trump to challenge a defeat on spurious grounds if the election had turned out close. Ultimately, the reason that Donald Trump's coup attempt failed was not that there were any principled people in the Republican Party to stop it, but that the margin was too big, and a substantial block of his co -conspirators like Barr decided they couldn't see a way to make it work. Don't expect any of those same people to act the same way if Trump loses more narrowly this time around. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. Enjoy what looks like it's going to be a pretty darn nice weekend. And if all goes well, we will talk again on Monday.