Good morning. It is May 28th. The morning clouds have briefly thinned in New York City, but the forecast still calls for rain to arrive in the afternoon, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Elon Musk blew up another rocket yesterday, following two launches in which SpaceX's Starship craft exploded into fireworks over the Caribbean while the company hailed its success at retrieving the booster rocket that had sent the exploding craft in the direction of space, for a while. The company this time managed to destroy both the spacecraft and the launch booster, offering the defensive caveats that the spacecraft traveled further than it did before the last two times it exploded and that the booster was being put through a more difficult maneuver than it had been the two times it was successfully retrieved. In its roundup of how the launch did or didn't achieve its mission goals, CNN writes, “Starship, the upper spacecraft, often referred to as ‘the ship,’ was not able to deploy eight dummy satellites as hoped. The vehicle's side hatch did not open all the way, preventing SpaceX from testing out how Starship might one day release cargo into orbit. Mission controllers lost contact with Starship and the vehicle began flying out of control because of a leak in the vehicle's fuel tank. It’s likely that the ship was torn apart as it slammed back into Earth's thick inner atmosphere. Also, SpaceX did not attempt to relight Starship's engines while in space. That was another testing milestone SpaceX had to forego because of the loss of control. With apologies to the good old American idiom, this is rocket science, which is to say, Musk is tinkering with technology that was able to fly to the moon more than a half century ago, and making hatches that open and fuel tanks that don't leak seem like the sort of technical challenges that a company that wants to fly to Mars could have a better grip on. 

In Politico's playbook this morning, Jack Blanchard, the crackerjack British import, who previously distinguished himself by making it clear that he had no idea that FDR's first hundred days in office had been particularly busy ones, weighs in on the fact that Donald Trump has now gone almost two days without talking to the press corps. Blanchard praises Trump's copious availability. “Aside from the lamentable attempt to ban AP,” he writes, “he's basically taken questions from all comers. It's impressive stuff.” 

And without Trump to fill the air with his talking, Blanchard is left to think about what's going on. And that thinking does not go well. “It does feel like at least some of the relentless minute-by-minute drama of Trump's first months back in power,” he writes, “has started to fade. Elon Musk's all-consuming Doge project feels much less significant since its principal character slinked back to the world of tech.” 

Let's pause here for a headline from Fox Live Now over the weekend. “Cuts hit National Weather Service, FEMA, ahead of hurricane season.” 

Now, back to Politico's sophisticated big picture view of current events. “Trump's market wobbling tariff wars,” Blanchard writes, “have become a series of snarled up trade talks.” Listeners to yesterday's podcast may recall that Donald Trump floated and then announced he was delaying a 50 percent tariff on the EU over the course of the just-concluded holiday weekend. Politico continues. “The Ukraine war looks intractable.” Sure, whatever that has to do with Donald Trump. And Blanchard writes, “Mass deportations have been hampered by limited resources and the courts.” 

Here's a headline from the Los Angeles Times yesterday. “Four-year-old Bakersfield girl facing deportation could die within days of losing medical care.” The story explains that the child is is in the United States under temporary humanitarian permission to receive medical care. But last month they were notified that that status had been terminated. The LA Times writes, “‘this is a textbook example of medical need,’ said the family's attorney, Rebecca Brown, of the pro bono legal firm, Public Counsel. This child will die and there's no sense for that to happen. It would just be a cruel sacrifice.” 

Back to Politico, Blanchard writes, “those of us covering the White House can actually take a quick breath.” 

And speaking of this moment when there's nothing worth Politico's White House delegation paying attention to, the lead spot on the front of this morning's New York Times, two columns wide, is “Pardon for a Donor’s Son After a $1 Million Dinner / Tax Cheat Spared by Trump in Time to Avoid Prison and a $4.4 Million Penalty.” The story is about how a former nursing home executive named Paul Walczak, whose mother is an extremely active Trump booster to the extent of having been involved in the plot to steal and publicize Ashley Biden's diary, had applied for a pardon after pleading guilty to tax crimes, but hadn't heard anything. Then, the Times writes, “his mother, Elizabeth Fago, was invited to a $1 million per person fundraising dinner last month that promised face-to-face access to Mr. Trump at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. Less than three weeks after she attended the dinner, Mr. Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon. It came,” the Times continues, “just in the nick of time for Mr. Walczak, sparing him from having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring,” the Times writes, “that there is not a get out of jail free card for the rich. The pardon, however, indicated otherwise.” 

That is the New York Times saying that in a straight up news story. Again, this guy was an executive in a nursing home company. The Times writes that “prosecutors said that between 2016 and 2019, he withheld more than $10 million from the paychecks of the nurses, doctors and others who worked at his facilities under the pretext of using it for their Social Security, Medicare and federal income taxes. Instead, he used some of the money to buy a $2 million yacht and to pay for travel and purchases at high end retailers, including Bergdorf Goodman and Cartier, prosecutors said.” 

Elsewhere on page one, as Politico and Jack Blanchard look around in boredom for anything to cover, “Kennedy Reverses C.D.C.’s Covid Vaccine Advice / Shot Guidance Ends for Healthy Children and Pregnant Women.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., after grifting his way to the top in the name of empowering people to make personal choices about their health care, is now fixing it so that people who want a COVID booster will have to fight their health insurance companies and search for providers who are willing to administer what is now a non-authorized shot. The loss of COVID booster coverage for pregnant women in particular exposes women to a greater risk of preeclampsia, miscarriage or death. 

Next to that, “CITIZENS MAY FEEL MIGRANT AID CUTS / Crackdown by G.O.P. on Safety-Net Programs.” President Trump, the story says, “has vowed to end what he calls the waste of hard earned taxpayer resources by cutting off federal benefits for undocumented immigrants and ensuring that funding goes to American citizens in need. Administration officials,” the story continues, “have said they would root out illegal aliens who are living in federally subsidized housing, the Agriculture Department has ordered states to enhance immigration verification practices used to determine eligibility for food stamps. And House Republicans just passed a tax bill that would limit certain immigrants access to benefits like Medicaid and Medicare, a popular tax credit for parents, and federal financial aid.” The piece goes on to say, “although Republicans say they want to remove incentives for people to enter the country illegally, unauthorized immigrants generally do not receive federal benefits, given efforts to chip away at their eligibility. Immigration experts and advocates for immigrant rights say the changes would instead largely be felt by children who are US citizens, but whose parents are undocumented, or immigrants who are authorized to live in the United States, such as refugees and people granted asylum. 12 % of American children or about 9 million people are citizens with at least one non-citizen parent.” 

Next to that is another story, like yesterday's dismayed liberal Trump triumphant immigrant coverage, describing how a woman fled back to Venezuela after two years in Branson, Missouri. 

Next to that, the headline is, “Fort Knox Gold Conspiracy’s Convenient Return / Trump-Allied Investors Are Game to Cash In. The Times writes “it is one of the more baffling storylines of Donald J. Trump's second term. The president has said he wants to personally visit Fort Knox to ensure that no one has stolen the government owned gold bars that are stored there. Mr. Trump,” the story continues, “has not explained why any gold might be missing from the nation's heavily guarded reserves. His own Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has insisted that there is no reason to worry. ‘All the gold is there,’ Mr. Bessent emphatically told Bloomberg in February, at one point looking directly into a camera and addressing the American people.” But then after a little hemming and hawing, the story gets around to explaining that the conservative influencer industry, very much including Donald Trump Jr., relies heavily on convincing anxious right-wingers to buy gold for themselves and that rumors that things may not be how they're supposed to be at Fort Knox help keep the buyers scared and pump up the revenue. The story notes at the end that the president, despite talking about inspecting the gold reserves, has refrained from going to Fort Knox to settle the supposed questions. 

And down in the right-hand corner of the front page, here's a story where Donald Trump only makes a cameo. It's another case where a classic New York Times construction is strained past the breaking point. “Cuomo's critics,” the headline says, Say His Agenda Is Like Adams’s.” 

“In the New York City mayor's race,” the story begins, “many of the candidates trying to displace former governor Andrew M. Cuomo from his front-runner status are deploying a new strategy. They contend that Mr. Cuomo is just like the current mayor, Eric Adams, which in many New Yorkers view is an unflattering comparison.” But what follows is mostly just the New York Times reporting the observable overlaps between Cuomo and Adams. “And yet,” the Times writes, “their similarities keep piling up. Mr. Adams has steered New York City in a more conservative direction after eight years under the left-leaning mayor Bill de Blasio. If Mr. Cuomo wins, he is expected to keep the city firmly in the ideological center. Both,” the Times continues, “are moderate Democrats who delight in attacking the left wing of their party. They have similar plans to get mentally ill people off the streets. They oppose rent freezes and support charter schools. They share more than 200 donors, including powerful real estate leaders.” 

Well, that last point especially seems to have moved entirely outside the realm of criticism. They could, more meaningfully, have set up the story as “Cuomo's supporters say his agenda is like Adams’s.” That is, the people who want Andrew Cuomo to be the mayor are the people who wanted Eric Adams to be the mayor, looking for a do-over, after the last person they put over for his friendliness with wealthy interests and lack of desire to change and improve the city turned out to be a little too ostentatiously willing to do things for money. 

And speaking of fallbacks and do-overs, the story moves on to say “When Mr. Cuomo recently decided to create his own independent third party to run on an extra ballot line in the general election, Mr. Adams, who is also collecting signatures for a third party run in November, appeared irritated. ‘All he's doing is looking at Eric Adams's playbook,’ the mayor said earlier this month at City Hall, adding, ‘he follows my housing plans. He follows my mental health plans.’” 

The Times then notes “the latest parallel between the two men was disclosed last week when the New York Times reported that the Justice Department was investigating Mr. Cuomo over whether he lied to Congress about his handling of the COVID pandemic.” 

“Parallel” isn't exactly the right concept, since the Trump administration is opening an investigation into Cuomo, and it closed the existing investigation into Adams's apparent bribe-taking. But in the broader sense, it's true that both of them are vulnerable to being manipulated by Donald Trump, and neither one seems to have the strength of character to resist it on the city's behalf. 

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 through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Please do send those in if you're able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.