Good morning. It is October 21st. It is a bright morning in New York City on the way to what's forecast to be an uncannily warm day. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The New York Liberty won their first ever WNBA championship last night, prevailing in overtime in their winner take all game five against the Minnesota Lynx, and offering a quarter century later a measure of redemption to the 1990s New York Knicks by showing it is possible to bring a championship to New York City by turning a championship showdown into a dire rock fight. The Liberty missed 21 of the 23 shots they attempted from three point range, but they out rebounded the Lynx 44 to 33, led by Brianna Stewart's 15 boards. They shot a passel of free throws thanks to aggressive inside play with Jonquel Cole Jones going 7-for-7 from the line, and they clamped down defensively, outscoring Minnesota 7-2 in overtime. 

In baseball, the Los Angeles Dodgers won the National League pennant, thumping the New York Mets 10-5 to close out the National League Championship Series in six games. The Dodgers will meet the American League champion New York Yankees in the World Series in a deeply dispiriting powerhouse matchup, redeemable only if Shohei Ohtani decides to rise to the occasion and obliterate the Yankees and assorted World Series batting records, which he is certainly capable of doing. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, two columns wide, “Trump becomes the star of Harris's closing pitch. Democrat shifts strategy, using his words to portray him as unfit to serve.” Kamala Harris is nominally the actor here, but what seems to be going on is that with two weeks and a day before election day. The Times is finally finding an angle in its politics coverage to push to the foreground the fact that Donald Trump is corrupt and deranged and would have jabbered his way out of the presidential race months ago, if not for his having been propped up simultaneously by an all-media propaganda campaign from a coalition of the country's worst billionaires and by the mainstream political presses contempt for the substance of politics and fear of being perceived as partisan. The opening anecdote inadvertently establishes what's going on as it describes this purported shift in Harris's campaign messaging. The Times writes, “‘see for yourself,’ she told a crowd in Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin on Thursday, gesturing to two large television screens installed at the rally. ‘Let's roll a clip.’ The video screens lit up with a 40-second montage of Mr. Trump bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade.” Then explaining what it has just described, the Times writes, “deploying his words as her sharpest weapons, Ms. Harris is pointing to Mr. Trump's erratic behavior and increasingly outlandish in anti-democratic statements to paint him as unfit, unstable, and above all, too dangerous for another term.” Now, she is doing that, and Trump is supplying her with ever more luridly deranged remarks to point to, but, what Harris was pointing to in that anecdote was just Trump's position and accomplishments on the subject of abortion. He did engineer the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. It has had grave consequences on people's access to health care. And the wild unpopularity of Trump's accomplishments in the area has been a powerful organizing and motivating force for Democratic voters. Why is this fundamental vulnerability of Trump's campaign being presented as something new in October? It's certainly not because of anything Kamala Harris decided to do strategically. The article goes on to argue that by calling attention to Trump, the Harris campaign runs a risk of enhancing his stature. As the Times writes, “his campaign has worked hard to project the impression that Mr. Trump is marching to an inevitable victory, even though nearly all available polling shows the race to be a dead heat as it tries to push infrequent voters to the polls. Mr. Trump's allies say his approach, a swaggering romp through purple and blue states alike that will take him to Madison Square Garden next week, is going to work, even if they can't quite say how or why.” 

Next to that, on page one, is part of The Times' apparent belated effort to make it not work. Under the tepid headline, “Musk the Contractor vs. Musk the U.S. Advisor,” The Times tries to round up all the ways in which Trump's promise to put Elon Musk in charge of a government efficiency panel would personally enrich Musk and give him regulatory impunity across his business empire, starting with SpaceX's desire to pollute the environment and cut corners, moving on to the SEC investigating his manipulative tweets about Tesla's stock, and not even getting around, despite talking about industry capture of advisory bodies to the FDA to discussing his monkey torturing brain implant company. Although an accompanying graphic does have arrows showing Neuralink, the monkey torturing company, facing investigation from the agriculture department and violations and fines from the Department of Transportation. Not entirely sure what he's doing with the monkeys to bring them under Pete Buttigieg's jurisdiction, but there it is. 

Below that on the jump page, the sudden surge of critical Trump reporting gets around to Arnold Palmer's penis, dateline Latrobe, Pennsylvania, under the headline, “At a Rally in Pennsylvania, Trump descends to even lower levels of vulgarity. Former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday,” Michael Gold writes, “spewed crude and vulgar remarks at a rally in Pennsylvania that included an off-color remark about a famous golfer's penis size and, of course, insult about Vice President Kamala Harris.” The Times goes on to quote Trump talking about how Arnold Palmer was “all man” and how shocked the other golf pros were by what they saw in the shower. The dick-remarks also made it into the jump of the story about Harris highlighting Trump's remarks. When the Times all but dropped the device of pretending to be talking about Harris's strategy to write, “but Mr. Trump has been delivering winding speeches that have alarmed some allies and he has doubled down on politically toxic threats to his opponents and a dark apocalyptic message that helps to illustrate Ms. Harris's point. Mr. Trump started the week with a town hall where he spent 39 minutes swaying silently on stage to his favorite songs, as if the evening's planned activity of answering voters' questions was no longer necessary. And he finished it in Pennsylvania on Saturday with a lewd joke about a famous golfer's genitals while also using vulgarity to refer to Ms. Harris.” They're still delivering the part about Trump glitching out and going blank on stage, under two layers of insulation, trying to somehow fit it under the rubric of what Harris is choosing to say about the remarks that Trump is making, when it was really just Trump being objectively and essentially apolitically bizarre. 

Below that jump, on page A13, The Times tries to hold Trump to account, but ends up carrying water for him with a pre-written piece about Trump's visit to a McDonald's in Pennsylvania, earnestly focused on debunking Trump's underlying claim that Kamala Harris had never really worked at a McDonald's, while giving a Trump spokesperson a chance to repeat the lie and firing off the whole piece before taking the opportunity to report on Trump's McDonald's appearance, in which, as The Washington Post wrote, the restaurant was closed to the public during Trump's visit, and the motorists whom Trump served were screened by the U.S. Secret Service and positioned before his arrival. No one ordered food, instead, the attendees received whatever Trump gave them. 

On page A14, Michael Bender provides four verbatim transcripts of Trump's addled remarks on different occasions in the past week, including talking about how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez never even studied the environment in college and that she went to a nice college in response to a question about inflation. 

And back on page one, down at the bottom, is an account of the death and life of 19-year-old Shaaban al-Dalou, who was incinerated on video last week when, what Israel called a precision strike hit a refugee encampment at a hospital compound in Gaza. Since Israel launched its devastating retaliation for the Hamas-led attack just over a year ago, the Times writes, Mr. al-Dalou had written impassioned pleas on social media, posted videos from his family's small plastic tent, and even launched a GoFundMe page calling out to the world for help getting out of the Gaza Strip. His mother was also burned alive in the attack, and his 10-year-old brother died of his burns afterward. 

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. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.