Good morning. It is August 25th. It's a sunny morning in New York City. The temperature is rising and the humidity is falling, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Israel attacked a hospital in Gaza today in what sounds like a classic double tap strike, knocking out a Reuters live video feed from the hospital and killing the camera operator and then attacking again, Reuters writes, “after rescue workers, journalists, and others had rushed to the site of the initial attack.” The current death toll from the attack is 20, with five of the dead being journalists, matching the number of journalists Israel killed with a deliberate strike two weeks ago. But nothing about this particular constellation of war crimes is new in any way. The Israeli military bombs hospitals. The Israeli military kills journalists. The Israeli military bombs hospitals to kill journalists. That's your war. That's what they're doing. 

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran resident of Maryland, who the Trump administration was forced to return to the United States after wrongfully deporting him to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador and who the administration that indicted in a nakedly flimsy and pretextual human trafficking case was, despite the supposed urgency of that criminal proceeding, arrested when he made a scheduled appearance at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Maryland this morning, as the government tries to carry out its newly announced plan to deport him to Uganda, a country to which he has no connection, and a test of whether there is going to be any meaningful check on the president's desire to turn the full force of the federal government toward harming  any individual person who makes the administration look bad.

On the front of this morning's New York Times, speaking of unchecked presidential power, the lead news spot, two columns wide, delivers a hideous headline, “The New Activist Investor Scrambling U.S. Business / President Demands Stakes for Government, Breaking From Free-Market System.” This is that thing where the Times tries to find a sort of arch and knowing way to talk about Donald Trump's abuses of power. The lead of the story says “corporate America has built up defenses against the like of Carl Icahn, Nelson Peltz and other corporate raiders who have rattled the cages of chief executives pushing for higher stock prices. Now the companies have a new investor to worry about, the president of the United States.” Right there is a fundamentally false premise when Carl Icahn or Nelson Peltz wants to jerk a company around, they buy shares of the company. Then, because they now own part of the company, they use that investment they've paid for and the privileges that attach to having invested money in a company to make demands. Donald Trump is not investing money in companies and then using that share to make demands. Donald Trump is threatening to use the powers of his office against companies or just using the powers of his office against companies to get leverage over them and then using that leverage to demand that the companies give him—or give the government, which is him—part ownership. There isn't any private sector analogy to Trump's behavior or to the extent there are any analogies, they involve illegal behavior such as a huge company working its way toward an illegal monopoly by threatening to destroy its smaller competitors unless they surrender and agree to be acquired. 

The piece likewise stretches and fumbles for points of comparison on the government side. “The US government,” the story writes, “has inserted itself into corporate America before. The Obama administration took stakes in banks and auto companies after the 2008 financial crisis, and both the Obama and Biden administrations used government subsidies to promote green technology.” But the financial crisis stuff in the front half of that was a negotiation about what the government will get in return for giving those sectors the financial support they needed to survive the crisis. It wasn't the government imposing the crisis and then demanding a payoff. And the back end about green technology subsidies is the kind of completely beside the point thing that you generally only see from pro-Trump propaganda outlets. What does he even accomplish to have made that limp rhetorical gesture? The Times then writes, “But experts say Mr. Trump's push is different from, and more aggressive than, what the United States had seen before. The companies he is targeting are not on the cusp of collapse, nor with their demise, as in the case of the banks during the financial crisis, set off a chain of events that could lead to global economic ruin.”

You don't need experts to say that. You just invented a completely fake justification for lawless behavior from the president and then appealed to the authority of experts to say that it's completely fake. The reader gains nothing from the effort to reframe completely abnormal behavior as if it were normal, followed by the conclusion that the frame just doesn't fit. The president is shaking down companies for ownership shares. Don't pretend there's some sort of case that this could be something other than what it is. 

Right below that on the page, the paper does pretty accurately describe and contextualize a different part of the Trump project. “Under Trump, Far-Right View Is Mainstream.” Here, instead of trying to turn to experts to discuss whether what the president is doing in any way resembles normal behavior, the piece turns the question of the embrace of extreme gutter racism by the people operating the highest levels of the government over to the gutter racists, who happily confirm, yes, the Trump administration is carrying out a racist far-right agenda. It opens by pointing out that there hasn't been much in the way of far-right street activism compared to Donald Trump's first term and then says, “and that, some leaders of the movement say, is because the president has effectively adopted their agenda. ‘Things we were doing and talking about in 2017 that were taboo, they're no longer taboo. They're mainstream now,’ said Enrique Tario, the chairman of the Proud Boys, who took part in many of those early far-right rallies. ‘Honestly, what do we have to complain about these days?’ Whether it is dismantling diversity programs, complaining about anti-white bias in museums, or promoting an aura of authoritarian nationalism, Mr. Trump has embraced an array of far-right views and talking points in ways that have delighted many right-wing activists who have long supported those ideas.” Notice there's no appeal to the fact that left-wing people have also had opinions about diversity programs and criticized bias in museum displays. 

Instead, the piece just goes through a long account of the enthusiastically racist brutal actions undertaken by the administration and the vile and unrepentant bigots who the administration has staffed up with, protected, and promoted. It describes, although for some reason doesn't name, the career of Marco Ellis, who got briefly fired from Doge for posting things like “normalize Indian hate,” after which the story says, “instead of letting the man go, Mr. Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance began a campaign to bring him back, suggesting that his offensive remarks were merely indiscretions disclosed to the public by journalists who were out to destroy his life. Around the same time,” the story continues, “the State Department hired a man named Darren Beatty to serve as the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. Beatty was brought into the government even though he had been fired from an earlier job as a speechwriter in the first Trump administration for appearing at a conference attended by white nationalists. Just months before his new appointment, Mr. Beatty was still posting racist messages online. ‘Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,’ he wrote on social media in October. ‘Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities and demoralizing competent white men.’” The story continues “in July, Mr. Beatty's portfolio expanded when he was named to run the U.S. Institute of Peace, which leads public diplomacy outreach at the State Department.” Then it notes the presence of the Defense Department of Deputy Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson, “the daughter,” it says, “of conservative commentator Steve Cortes,” who outshines the pro-Nazi sympathies of the other anti-Semites in the Trump administration by going all the way back before the Holocaust to argue that it was good that Leo Frank got lynched in 1915. These are the people who run the country, and the story is remarkably unhesitant to say so. 

The picture across the top of the front page is of a ravaged section of rainforest or former rainforest in Indonesia. The headline is “Sawing Down Borneo’s Rainforests to Build R.V.s for Americans.” Apparently the meranti tree, which grows in the region, produces, the Times writes, “a plywood that is lightweight, moisture resistant, flexible, and cut into thin sheets. RV makers use it for interior walls, flooring, cabinets, and other features.” They could use composites instead, or they could use the same wood from sustainable farms. But those options would cost more money, so they don't. 

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.