Good morning. It is April 10th. It is a little bit cold and a little bit cloudy in New York City. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

We'll start with what was not yesterday's biggest story as a measure of how overheated the entire news environment is. Last night, the House of Representatives failed to pass a budget resolution, as the most far right Republican faction refused to go along with their party's House Speaker Mike Johnson when he tried to get them to approve the resolution passed by the Republican Senate. 

“The outcome,” Politico writes, “is a brutal blow for House GOP leaders and the president who have spent days trying to wrangle the votes for the fiscal blueprint.” The House is supposed to leave for a two-week recess today, but Politico quoted various sources as suggesting either they might try again today before they leave or they might cut short their recess at one week. But again, the fact that the ruling party is too dysfunctional to pass a budget is only second tier news because the president, well, what did the president do exactly? 

This morning's New York Times gives Donald Trump's actions yesterday a full width headline that for all its bold presentation manages to get the basic facts wrong. According to the big words stretched across the page, what happened was “Trump Pauses Many Tariffs for 90 Days, but Not on China,” which is wrong in at least two important respects. 

CNBC managed to write an accurate headline. “Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10 % for most countries, hits China harder with 125%.” The Times headline accepted the language that Donald Trump chose to use when he belatedly confronted the fact that his plans for all out trade war against pretty much the entire world at once were panicking investors toward a full global financial crisis, Trump's claim that he was “pausing” the tariffs turned the stock market around, and judging by the sales volume charts enabled some group of people, who were apparently aware his announcement was coming, to cash in nicely on the turnaround, but it did not stop the trade war. It just lowered the severity of some of the hostilities, as the Times itself writes in the lead news column under the sub headline”Markets Surge After Quick Reversal on Reciprocal Fees.”

“Nearly every US trading partner now faces a 10 % blanket tariff on top of the 25 % tariffs that Mr. Trump has imposed on cars, steel, and aluminum.” There is the thing that's really happening. Every single imported product is going to cost at least 10 % more than it did. Six months ago, the dogma was that political legitimacy in the United States rose or fell on the question of inflation. And no matter what other accomplishments a president might point to, if consumer prices went up, the administration had failed the American people. Six weeks ago, imposing tariffs on everything starting at 10 % would have been received as an economic catastrophe. But Trump's actions are getting graded against the even more disastrous things. And so the headlines, by no means just in the Times, declare that tariff war is tariff peace.

And the same thing applies to the tail end of the headline, where what Trump did with respect to China yesterday is presented as a matter of simple continuity with his announced plans, a non-pause, when what he did was to finish the job of terminating all trade with China. As the subheadline on the Times' second news column says, “In Game of Chicken, U.S. Lifts Rate on Beijing to 125%”. 

“Lifts” is the wrong verb to use for the imposition of a tariff, since “lift” can also mean to remove. Anyway, as the story says, on Wednesday, “China announced an additional 50 % tariff on US goods, matching new American levies that had taken effect hours earlier. China also struck at American companies, imposing export controls on a dozen of them, and adding six others to a list of unreliable entities, preventing them from doing business in China. China's new tariffs,” the Times writes, “which will take effect on Thursday, mean all American goods shipped to China will face an additional 84 % import tax. On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Trump retaliated, raising tariffs on Chinese exports to 125%. Both figures would have been unimaginable a few weeks ago.” 

So far this morning, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, after investors' burst of exuberant relief yesterday, is down 2%. Unfortunately, if you're looking for somewhere else to put your money, Marisa Kabas is reporting today that Elon Musk's Doge demolition team is moving on to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation today. And in other agency news, government executive reports that the Trump administration following up on the president's executive order, claiming in the name of national security, that the president has the power to abolish the unions covering hundreds of thousands of federal workers, by stopping the deduction of union dues from those workers' paychecks. “The administration, the story says, has filed multiple lawsuits in federal courts, staffed only with Republican-appointed judges, seeking the legal go-ahead to terminate union contracts at agencies targeted by the order. Despite those suits' suggestion that the administration would wait for such a decision before repudiating collective bargaining agreements, unions said that this week, the government's three main payroll processors have all surreptitiously ceased collecting union dues directly from employees' paychecks.” 

The Keystone pipeline spilled what its operators say was 3,500 barrels of crude oil in North Dakota. Bloomberg reports that the company has declared force majeure as the shutdown of the pipeline prevents oil deliveries. “Keystone warns customers,” Bloomberg writes, “that it may not be able to meet obligations to send oil through the conduit as far back as 5 p.m. local time Tuesday. The pipe system,” the story says, “hauls more than 620,000 barrels of crude daily from Canada to U.S. markets.” 

The roof collapse of the Jet Set Nightclub in the Dominican Republic makes it onto page one of The Times in feature story form. “In a Flash, a Vibrant Dominican Nightclub Became a Graveyard / Hope for More Survivors
Is Beginning to Fade.” There's a whole long setup, including “live music Mondays at Jet Set, were something of a tradition in the Dominican capital, where a penchant for enjoying life and good music helped the nightclub thrive with locals and tourists alike.” So you have to take the jump before you can even get to the death toll, which was 124 when the Times put the print edition to bed and is now in the online version of the story up to 218. 

Alongside the jump in the print edition with almost certainly a much higher body count once it's eventually calculated is “Experts fighting HIV in children are let go, sweeping dismissals endanger millions.” 

“The Trump administration,” the Times writes, “has dismissed the few remaining health officials who oversaw care for some of the world's most vulnerable people, more than 500,000 children and more than 600,000 pregnant women with HIV in low income countries. Expert teams that manage programs meant to prevent newborns from acquiring HIV from their mothers and to provide treatment for infected children were eliminated last week in the chaotic reorganization of the Health and Human Services Department. Some of the consequences of the dismissals are only now coming to light. While it was known,” the Times writes, “that some staff members devoted to HIV prevention in other countries had been lost, the New York Times has learned that all such experts have now been terminated or are awaiting reassignment at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State Department, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. These maternal health programs are still funded by the president's emergency plan for AIDS relief or PEPFAR, but without personnel, it's not clear how the work will continue.” 

And in a little piece of boilerplate that also tells its own story, “the Health and Human Services Department did not respond to a request for comment.” 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Ending the Day Morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho.

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