Good morning. It is April 7th. It is a dark, wet and miserable morning here in Manhattan. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The Dow Jones industrial average immediately dropped more than 4 % at the opening bell today, then bounced about halfway back up. If it follows the pattern of trading, in the days since Donald Trump announced his arbitrary omnidirectional and overwhelming campaign of tariffs against the rest of the world. That bounce back should most likely be followed by a more gradual decline through the rest of the day. The opening crash dipped the Dow all the way below 3,700. Japan's Nikkei index, which already wrapped up its Monday trading, finished down 7.83 points. The London Stock Exchange is down about 4%.

The whole situation is basically as if everybody had known 9-11 was coming in advance and could just turn on the TVs expecting to see the planes hit the buildings except, hang on, at the moment the plane s appear to have bounced off the buildings with the Dow Jones Industrial Average reversing itself entirely going straight up into positive territory. The stock market is either caught up in some kind of spontaneous burst of American exceptionalism or there's news via some random tweet the current claim is that Kevin Hassett the director of the White House National Economic Council has purportedly said Trump will consider a 90-day pause on the tariffs which seems like a pretty slender read to catapult the whole market up with especially since at bottom it would mean that the president waffling unpredictably back and forth on questions that involve the fate of the entire global economy and just like that, speaking of hopelessly mercurial seats of power and influence, the market just plunged into the negative again, as the people making decisions with trillions of dollars of money, apparently caught on that they had just conjured a desperate rally out of nothing in particular.

In other news about things that are devastatingly real and serious while also being entirely fake at the most fundamental level, 60 Minutes reports that on investigating the records of the people that the Trump administration abducted without due process and delivered to a torture prison in El Salvador, they were unable to find any criminal records for 75 % of them. In the online story about it, CBS News writes, in response to 60 Minutes findings, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman said many of those without criminal records are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters, and more. They just don't have a rap sheet in the US. 

60 Minutes’ reporting confirmed that one of the prisoners who was seen crying for his mother and being slapped around as the Salvadoran guards forcibly shaved his head was, as his family had claimed, a gay Venezuelan makeup artist who had been seeking asylum in the United States. 

Update to the update, the White House apparently told CNBC that the idea of a tariff pause is “fake news.” 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, right down on the fold, you can't really fault the headline as a pre-write. “After Meltdown, Wall St. Braces for More Chaos / Titans of Finance Who Backed Trump Face Tariff Fallout.” 

Also some nice photo editing, as above that story, which begins “there was little rest on wall street this weekend. There was plenty of anger anxiety frustration and fear,” based on a reporting blitz over the weekend with bankers executives and traders, the Times has a pair of three-column pictures of the world economy itself in the form of someone stacking what looked like wheel rims for automobiles, on a cart in a factory in hangzhou with most of the foreground of the picture taken up by a vast pile of those shiny rings. And below that, a picture of textile workers in Kenya, surrounded by piles and piles of what looks like denim as they cut the fabric under rows of fluorescent lights. 

Running along the right-hand margin of those pictures in the second news column is a NEWS ANALYSIS piece, “Tariff Barrage Likely to Push U.S. to Margin / Endangering Status as Driver of Global Trade.” The piece compares Trump's tariff announcement to Brexit. “The shock of Mr. Trump's move,” the Times writes, “is reverberating even more widely, given the larger size of the American economy and its place at the fulcrum of global commerce. Yet, as with Brexit, its ultimate impact is unsettled. Mr. Trump could yet reverse himself, chastened by plummeting markets or mollified by one-off deals. More important, economists say, the rise of free trade may be irreversible, its benefits so powerful that the rest of the world finds a way to keep the system going even without its central player.” The story goes on to say “the European Union, optimists point out, did not unravel after Britain's departure.” Sure. Britain, on the other hand. 

In case that's not enough to feel good about, the lead news column is “TRUMP ERODING CYBERDEFENSES AS PERIL GROWS / THREATS TO ELECTIONS / Waltz Says Priority Shifts to Offense, but Critics See Risky Tactics.” In this account, President Trump's decision to fire, at the behest of right-wing nutbag Laura Loomer, the heads of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, was just part of the overall degradation of the country's online warfare capabilities. “Cybersecurity experts, election officials and lawmakers,” the Times writes, “mostly Democrats, but a few Republicans, have begun to raise alarms that the United States is knocking down a system that, while still full of holes, has taken a decade to build. It has pushed out some of its most experienced cyber defenders and fired younger talent brought in to design defenses against a wave of ransomware, Chinese intrusions and vulnerabilities created by artificial intelligence.” 

Well, at least the administration is also pardoning a bunch of crypto scammers and other online crooks. So when the ransomware hits, there'll be plenty of places to process the extortion payments. 

On the top left of the page, “Experts Warn Of Weaponry Left in Syria / Over 100 Sites May Hold Old Chemical Arms.” The number comes from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,” which, the Times writes, “seeks to enter Syria to assess what remains of Bashar al-Assad's notorious military program. The figure is far higher than any that Mr. al-Assad has ever acknowledged. Assad”, the paper writes, “used weapons like sarin and chlorine gas against rebel fighters and Syrian civilians during more than a decade of civil war. The new post-revolutionary Syrian government did tell the organization that it would destroy any remains of the chemical weapons program developed under the Assad regime and comply with international law.” 

The hundreds of thousands or millions of people who turned out in all 50 states to protest against the Trump administration on Saturday did not rate any follow-up story in today's paper after making page 18 of the Sunday paper. But a sample of four Trump voters, one Kamala Harris voter and one Jill Stein voter did get to weigh in with their thoughts about the tariffs. “The risk taking the bold moves the scary stuff that he does to me is no surprise,” says the Jill Stein voter. “Some people say it's a force for good or for bad, but he is a force” Says one of the Trump voters, and another Trump voter tells the Times he was troubled by the mistaken deportation Of the migrant father to the Salvadoran prison. “It could be the line in the sand for him to possibly drop his support for the president,” he said, “if we make these mistakes and don't correct them quickly.” 

As of this morning, the Fourth Circuit officially shares that concern, upholding the order from a lower court, saying that the Trump administration has until 11:59 today to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States from the Salvadoran torture prison. The Fourth Circuit panel wrote, “the United States government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. The government's contention otherwise and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene are unconscionable.” 

And just to take one more look at the thrashing of the stock market, the Dow Jones seems to have reversed direction for the fourth time today, is now going down again and is about two and a half percent down from where it last closed. 

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. Continue sending those to us if you can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.