Good morning. It is August 19th. It is sunny and not too hot in New York City as the lull from the worst of summer continues. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The entire top of the front page is occupied by yesterday's emergency group summit in Washington, DC. “Zelensky and allies press Trump for security guarantees.” There's a five column photo of a line of leaders with Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine and Donald Trump in the middle, with Trump breaking the orderly flow of the formation and looking startled and dyspeptic. Below that, there's a picture of the leaders sitting at a table and a picture of Trump and Zelensky shaking hands in an oval office where cheap gold-tone decor seems to be spreading like a cancer someone online had posted a before and after set of photos of of the two white house meetings between Trump and Zelensky capturing the horrifying overgrowth of shiny and superficial decoration in between, as Trump inscribed his personality on the space. “President Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine the Times writes, backed by an extraordinary delegation of European leaders defended his nation's interests at the White House on Monday as President Trump pressed for a quick peace agreement with Russia that would require Ukraine to make significant concessions.” The story describes the meeting as outwardly cordial, unlike when Trump and J.D. Vance ambushed and scolded Zelensky last time around. But the background to this meeting was Trump's hasty and abject-seeming summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska last week and the Times reports, “Mr. Trump paused the meeting with the Europeans and Mr. Zelensky on Monday to call Mr. Putin, according to two people familiar with the matter. Yuri Ushakov, Mr. Putin's foreign policy advisor, said the two men had a frank and very constructive 40-minute conversation about the negotiations with Mr. Zelensky and the European leaders.” 

That's how things are unraveling in foreign affairs. In domestic affairs, well, here's where the stories that are really all one story, stood in the morning paper. On the lower left, the headline is “Texas Democrats End Walkout Clearing Way to Pass New Map. Standoff puts spotlight on redistricting,” which is a pretty understated way of describing what's happening in Texas. The story begins, “Democrats in the Texas state legislature who had left the state to halt an aggressive redistricting effort, returned to Texas and ended their two week walkout on Monday opening the way for Republicans to pass a redrawn congressional map called for by President Trump.” 

What “aggressive” means here, although it takes a while for the story to get to it, is that the Republicans are out to take five congressional seats from the Democrats, turning a state delegation that's currently 25 Republicans and 13 Democrats into one that would be 30 Republicans and eight Democrats by redrawing the state's district map to break up Democratic voting population centers, says the people who live there are effectively denied the franchise, and the National Democratic Party has its chance to win the House of Representatives critically impaired. The Republicans are now using the police to help them carry out the power grab and prevent the Democratic members of the state legislature from fleeing the state again to impede the passage of the gerrymander.

The Times describes the circumstance by writing, “in an unexpected coda Monday afternoon, one Democrat refused to leave the state house floor in protest over a Republican requirement that all returning Democrats have state police officers with them to make sure they did not flee again.” Another way of describing this “protest,” where a Democratic representative, Nicole Collier of Fort Worth, expressed her opposition to a Republican “requirement” would be to say that the Republicans are holding a Democratic legislator locked in the chamber. The other Democrats were only allowed to leave if they signed permission slips. That's the actual term in use that subjected them to round the clock police supervision. The Times writes, “‘she has not signed the slip and so she cannot leave the Capitol,’ said Representative Charlie Garan, a Fort Worth Republican who oversees Texas House administration.” If the Republican is saying she's not allowed to leave, she's not staging some sort of sit-in against the Republicans. She's being held prisoner because she's resisting their effort to rig the next election in advance. 

On the other side of the bottom of page one, the headline is “Haitians fueled revival in Ohio, but must leave.” It starts off describing how an automotive metal worker is preparing to move to Canada after four years in Springfield, Ohio. He was, the Times reports, “among more than 10,000 Haitians who in recent years settled in this working-class city of 60,000. They were welcomed by a Republican governor and business leaders who needed workers to power companies that had been enticed to invest millions there. Over the last four years, Springfield had rebounded, thanks in large part to the arrival of Haitian immigrants.” Then what happened? A bunch of abstractions, mostly. “As the political winds shifted,” the Times writes, “so did their prospects and perhaps Springfield's as well. The city became a flashpoint in the national immigration debate last year when Mr. Trump, from the debate stage, amplified a baseless claim by his running mate, JD Vance, that Haitians here were stealing and eating pets. The accusation inflamed growing tensions over rising rents and schools supporting students learning English.” Flashpoint. Debate. Tensions. 

What this story is about is the fact that the president and vice president of the United States, the latter following the lead of online neo-Nazis, are in the middle of successfully carrying out a program of ethnic cleansing in Springfield, Ohio. They campaigned on telling lies about the immigrant population, and once in office, they implemented a set of measures designed to drive them away. This is happening in Springfield, Ohio, right now the efforts of the US government are forcing out the non-white immigrant population. 

Next to that story on page one, the headline is, “In Crackdown, DC's Homeless Feel More Pain.” Here the news is that the efforts of the federal government are focused on driving homeless people out of Washington, DC. For some 15 years, the Times writes, “David Brown had made a home in Washington Circle, living in a tent with a handful of others in an encampment. On Friday, that home was destroyed. His tent, clothing, and other possessions were tossed into a dumpster by police officers carrying out President Trump's crackdown on some of the city's most powerless residents.” 

Again, this is it. That's what they're doing. At the bottom of the jump page for that story about the president using the power of his office to force people who have nowhere to go to go somewhere else in the name of fighting crime and disorder, there's a story about the opposition party's response, or lack thereof, which is also effectively a story about the New York Times' response, or lack thereof. “As President invites a fight with Democrats over crime,” the headline says, “they tread cautiously.” Again, as with the “flashpoint” over people from Haiti living in Ohio, the Times wants to talk about abstractions. “With his efforts to take control of law enforcement in Washington,” the paper writes, “President Trump has pushed the issue of crime back to the foreground of American politics. In doing so,” the story continues, “he's invited to fight with Democrats who are treading cautiously as they seek to forcefully oppose the federal incursion into the nation's capital.” A federal incursion into the nation's capital, that's an actual concrete action. “Something no president has ever attempted.” That's a useful piece of context, “without getting caught up in a debate over public safety on Mr. Trump's terms.” Why are the Democrats afraid of getting caught up in a debate over public safety on Mr. Trump's terms? It might have something to do with the fact that they live in a world where the New York Times can write a story like this without ever directly, in its own voice, presenting the reader with the flat fact that crime rates are down. 

The Times describes Trump's deployment of federal agents and National Guard troops in Washington, DC as “an actualization of one of his most tried and true political arguments. Democrats, often black Democrats, have let lawlessness run rampant in the cities and states they were elected to run.” Now, is that an actualization of the argument? Or is it an invitation to treat the argument as having been actualized? This declaration of what purpose Donald Trump is achieving gets as counterweight the Times writing, “among Democrats, there is widespread agreement that Mr. Trump is stoking fear for political gain and exaggerating statistics to justify a power grab.” Is Trump's relationship to the actual crime statistics something for Democrats to debate among themselves? Or is it something for a newspaper to publish as a fact? 

But the facts about crime only appear in subordinate clauses, in sentences about things the Democrats are doing. Lower down, considerably lower down in the story, the Times writes, “some Democrats have seized the opportunity to talk about their own credentials on public safety, in places where violent crime has fallen on their watch, while being careful to acknowledge that a falling crime rate doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem”. Or, a little bit after that, “in Washington, Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, appears well aware that Washington's historically low rate of violent crime hasn't prompted a significant change in people's perception of the issue.” 

In this story, pegged to the president's claim that he is fighting crime in Washington, DC with federal forces, that's the extent of the empirical coverage of crime in the Capitol. 

And on page A15, the headline at the top of the page is “Trump leads charge to eliminate mail-in ballots and voting machines.” 

“President Trump vowed on Monday the Times' rights to lead a movement to eliminate the use of mail-in ballots, continuing his legally dubious crusade against the nation's voting rules, which he has long attacked and falsely blamed for his 2020 election loss. So to recap, Republican state legislators in Texas are holding a Democrat prisoner while they try to steal five seats in Congress. Ethnic cleansing is well underway. Homeless people are targeted by federal forces that are deployed under false pretenses, and the president is trying to shut down a basic part of the voting system. 

Really seems like time for some ideas beyond hang in there until the midterms. 

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. Keep sending those along if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.