Good morning. It is January 21st. It is a scaldingly cold morning in New York City as the air that belongs over the North Pole has once again slipped off the top of the planet and sagged down over the North American continent while unseasonably hot air rushes into the Arctic behind it. Climate scientists remain divided on whether this particular anomaly represents another destabilizing effect of global warming, or just the natural irregularity of the planet, a bit of ordinary tossing and turning by the mortally wounded Arctic as it lies on its deathbed, and this is your Indignity Morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

High dry winds have returned to drought-stricken Southern California, raising the fire risk again as the two big Los Angeles wildfires continue to burn and smaller ones keep cropping up. President Donald Trump, after promising in his inaugural address to make America rich by extracting, exporting, and burning as much of the liquid gold, as he called it, of fossil fuels as possible, put out an executive order demanding a halt to all wind power development on federal lands and offshore as the country moves toward trying to incinerate the planet as fast as it possibly can.

That inaugural address and the formal arrival of the new Trump presidency unavoidably dominate to the front of this morning's New York Times under a little decorative header saying “the 47th president.” The two line page spanning headline is “Trump caps return to power, vowing to stop a U S ‘decline.’” Decline is in quotes to further bring home the momentousness of the occasion. The Times breaks out a special extra wide column built on what looks like a five column format instead of the usual six. The subhead is “he sees a mandate as both personal and political.” We're already in trouble before we've even gotten out of the headline package. The idea that what Trump sees and what Trump says are identical should have been put to rest a long, long time ago with the special counsel's report about his intentional campaign of lying about the 2020 election to incite an insurrection against the results, standing as the most recent definitive example. The available evidence is that Trump knows perfectly well that he has neither a personal nor a political mandate, but that he scraped out one of the narrowest victories on record with the help of an overwhelming propaganda campaign backed by the plutocracy to demoralize the electorate and that the only president with worse popularity polling on his inauguration day was Donald Trump last time around. As for his having capped his return to power, the print edition went to bed before it could do more than begin to reckon with how far Trump is from having reached any height or cap of his desire for power. 

The jump headline on that story about the inaugural address is, “with flurry of orders, president moves quickly to put his stamp back on the government.” Though there are only two paragraphs stuffed in there on that theme. “Mr. Trump,” the Times writes, “moved quickly beyond Inauguration Day ceremonies to put his stamp back on the government as he signed the first of as many as 100 orders and actions. He vowed to immediately declare a national emergency at the southern border and send the military to guard it. He said he would end government programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. He said he would rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and promise to seize the Panama Canal. ‘We're taking it back,’ he said. The first nine orders and documents he signed in front of a crowd of thousands of supporters at Capital One Arena in the early evening rescinded 78 of President Joe Biden's executive actions, blocked new regulations, froze federal hiring, pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord again, and directed agencies to end government censorship and the weaponization of the Justice Department. That may sound like a lot, but it doesn't include the mass pardons he issued to some 1600 of the January 6th attackers and the commutations he gave to the most dangerous offenders, or his order that the Justice Department drop any other prosecutions in the works. Say you have a mandate, mobilize your armed mob. Nor does the print edition have the Nazi salutes that Elon Musk snapped off during the rally. Although there is a picture of Musk giving an open mouth thumbs up in the inauguration crowd to go with the story, “Trump oligarchs buying up prime Washington addresses.” Calling them oligarchs is, I guess, a nice step forward. 

Below that, on page A17, is humiliating news for New York City about Mayor Eric Adams. “Adams attends inauguration of president, who could pardon him.” Specifically, Adams dropped his scheduled Martin Luther King Jr. obligations in New York City to scurry down to Washington, D.C. after the Trump administration dropped him a last-minute invitation, “the mayor” the Times writes, “left to drive to Washington at around 3 a.m. after receiving an invite from Steve Witkoff, a billionaire New York real estate executive and Mr. Trump's special envoy to the Middle East.” Unmentioned is the fact that that meant driving through the tail end of a snowstorm. 

Up at the top of the page in the corner, “Trump shuts a program to oversee asylum bids,” about how the Border Patrol turned off the app that asylum seekers had been managing their appointments on. 

On the next spread, the headlines are, “President's energy emergency would promote oil and gas,” as mentioned. “Trump orders the US to withdraw from the Paris Climate Pact,” and “man behind family separation prepares for mass deportations.” A look at Trump's incoming border czar, coming back for a second go-around with Trump after Barack Obama had promoted him up through the ranks.

As for those mass deportations, the New York Post, which had reported they would be underway today, now writes that they are on hold for now after an effort to keep the element of surprise, according to multiple law enforcement sources. “The Post,” the Post writes, “previously reported that ICE was planning a big F-dash-king operation starting Tuesday in multiple sanctuary cities, including New York City.” ICE, I-C-E, I guess Wikipedia says it's ICE and everyone's going to be saying it a lot in the days and weeks and years to come. Right now we're still not even 24 hours in. 

That is at least some of the terrifying sludge eruption of 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.

Our podcasting work is sustained through these subscription dollars and tips of you, the audience. Please do keep those coming. Stay warm and safe as best you can. And if no unexpected logistical problems crop up, we will talk again tomorrow.