Good morning. It is November 8th. The weather in Manhattan is cool and bright and maybe only a month out of joint, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The internet is full of guesswork and recriminations as people try to understand the mood of the electorate that chose to send Donald Trump back to the White House and to make their model of that mood fit whatever their priors were, because the whole world going wrong just means more evidence that you were right. But the question of what did it all mean is unanswerable with the data currently in hand and fundamentally pointless since there won't be some future chance to rerun the 2024 election being meaner to trans people, or harsher against immigration, or, for that matter, less welcoming of Liz and Dick Cheney, and more assertive against corporate price gouging. The voters voted. If there is an election in 2028 it's going to involve a materially different country, a different electorate, and different democratic and republican parties. So rather than gnawing on the past it's time to smell the coming future.

For instance, via Bloomberg, “Private prison stocks soar after Trump win on deportation plans.” This is a much clearer and more useful piece of reporting than sending writers out to try to talk to representative members of the public about how they felt about immigration, and what they thought they were doing when they cast their vote for Trump. It may be conceptually interesting or whatever to hear people say that they went with Trump while not really believing that he was going to deliver on the MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs being waived at the Republican convention, but it's a moot point now. The people to hear from are people like George Zoley, the founder and executive chairman of GEO Group, Inc., who Bloomberg quotes as having said on an earnings call, “we expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security, as well as interior enforcement, and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.” Bloomberg continues, “GEO chief executive officer Brian Evans added that unused beds at their facilities could generate $400 million in annualized revenues if filled. And the company has the capacity to scale up an existing surveillance and monitoring program to cover millions of immigrants for additional revenue. ‘This is to us an unprecedented opportunity,’ he said.” Bloomberg writes, “Geo Group stock rocketed to close at $24.43 a share on Thursday from a close of $14.18 the day before the election. Another private prison company Core civic incorporated, registered a similar move rising as high as $22.35 Thursday versus Monday's closing price of $13.19.” Core civic ticked down a bit from that high but the sidebar on the piece shows both stocks continuing to move up today.

The morning New York Times By contrast is all about the mood fumbling around to find the will of the people. The lead story is “President-elect spun his own grievances into political gold.” That's full width. “He became vessel for the anger of millions,” was the subhead. The whole thing is a look back at the campaign and how it went. The necessity of matching the story to the outcome means that Trump's skeleton campaign staff becomes a campaign operation that was his most stable yet, and a close knit campaign team. His inability to mount a normal campaign operation becomes a chance for his team to pursue the highest return on investment. Sure. Fine. It's all unfalsifiable now. Mostly the story is commendably modest about all this after discussing how Kamala Harris considered and rejected a plan to use her debate with Trump to challenge him on live TV to a rematch and instead left Trump to control his own time and his own message the rest of the way. The story notes “not every decision Mr. Trump made was genius because he won and not every decision Ms. Harris made was poor because she lost. But in a race and in a nation so narrowly divided, Mr. Trump and his team made just enough of the right ones.” If you're looking for lost opportunities that really mattered, there's one in there that's not really about the campaign at all. “Mr. Trump,” the Times writes, “scored one break from the justice system when a judge pushed his September sentencing until after the election. Mr. Trump privately told people he thought that would have tested what voters would tolerate.” It is, I wouldn't say reassuring, but at least it's conducive to sanity to hear that Donald Trump basically agrees with Indignity’s assessment of where 2024 was really lost. For all the blather about how Trump's criminal problems fired up his base, the most logical outlook is that it's hard to keep a criminal from looking like a reasonable political candidate If you won't lock him up. 

On the other side of page one the Times’s s Trump campaign trail features reporter Sean McCreesh files a campaign notebook in which after months of writing the kind of nudge and wink dispatches that infuriate regular old readers by presenting Trump and his people as they want to be presented and that in turn make wise journalists shake their heads at the ignorance of those readers and their inability to appreciate a subtle skewering after all that McCreesh just celebrates the potency of the Trump message at face value. “There is no doubt about one thing,” he writes, “Mr. Trump was a ferociously effective campaigner.” This is the same newspaper that was assiduously documenting people walking out of his rallies in boredom and exhaustion earlier this very week, but now it's toot toot for the Trump train. “To watch him up close on this third run for president was to see him blend comedy, fury, optimism, darkness and cynicism like never before. He was an expert communicator, able to transmit legal and mortal peril to build upon his self-mythology. He won new supporters and kept old ones in thrall.” Save it for your book proposal, buddy. We all read the rest of the paper and saw the clips.

Enthrall all the way out to the parking lot while he kept rambling. They definitely voted for the idea of the guy, but don't pretend it was the showmanship just because you were getting paid to watch the show.

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. Our podcasting work is sustained by subscription dollars from you the listeners, please do click that button to keep us going. And if things go as expected, we will talk again on Monday.