Good morning. It is April 3rd. It's a cloudy day in New York City and it's going to be a warm one, at least briefly so in the late afternoon, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

I had a nice ripe mango for breakfast and it might be the last mango that comes in the door for a while. After Donald Trump unveiled a package of tariffs at the White House yesterday designed to crush American trade with the rest of the world in the name of building national self-sufficiency. So, no more mangoes, until the masses of unemployed American mango workers across the rust belt get back on the job in our reopened and revitalized mango factories, restoring our country to its long-lost pinnacle of dominance in the global tropical fruit manufacturing industry. 

The markets appear to want their fruit a little bit sooner than that. Market futures slumped as soon as Trump made the tariff announcement yesterday. And at the opening bell of the actual markets, the indexes went straight down. A little over an hour into today's trading, the homepage of the Wall Street Journal is “U.S. stocks, dollar tumble after Trump tariff splits. Dow Industrials plummet 1,500 points. NASDAQ plunges 4%. S &P slides 3%.” 

The Bloomberg headline is “US stocks tumble at the open after tariff onslaught, S &P 500 in correction territory.” 

The Washington Post has “Stocks fall, businesses recoil after Trump imposes tariffs.” 

The New York Times website has “US markets plunge from shock of Trump's new tariffs.” 

New York Mayor Eric Adams, liberated from prosecution on his bribery charges, announced that he is not going to try to slug it out with the many candidates who have piled into the Democratic mayoral primary field, hoping to replace him, but intends instead to skip ahead to the general election running as an independent. He needs to get a whole lot of signatures to get himself on the ballot. But as someone with a long history of attracting near-miraculous numbers of small dollar donors, he shouldn't have any problem with that. 

New York Times is reporting, but not making any room on its homepage for the news, which emerged during Cory Booker's marathon Senate floor speech, that Republican senators have settled on a scheme to make Donald Trump's tax cut package permanent by simply replacing the Senate parliamentarian's judgment of whether their budget package impermissibly adds to the deficit with the judgment of Trump loyalist Senator Lindsey Graham, who chairs the Budget Committee. 

“Nonpartisan budget scorekeepers, the Times writes, “have estimated that extending the tax cuts would cost roughly $4 trillion over a decade. Senate Republicans, who also want to cut a long list of other taxes, are arguing that keeping the original Trump tax cuts in place is actually free.” The story goes on to say, “under typical budget rules, Republicans would have to find long-term spending cuts that cover the cost of the Trump tax cuts far into the future, or schedule them to expire again within 10 years. With a change in the baseline, though, continuing the Trump tax cuts would not appear to add to the deficit, so Republicans believe they could pass a law that would keep them in place forever. Under the Biden administration, it was the parliamentarian who ordered the Democrats to lop off key parts of their budget plans, including a $15 minimum wage from the American Rescue Plan. Exceeding to the parliamentarian's rulings back then was an important part of preserving the Senate's bipartisan respect for rules and the institutional norms of good government. Now,” the Times quotes Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who is positioned as one of the least Trumpy, most responsible and institutionalist, members of the Republican conference saying, “we would not be overruling the parliamentarian. We would be supporting the interpretation of the chairman.” 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the tariffs are the big story. A photo of Trump in the Rose Garden seen from behind delivering his tariff announcement takes up the leftmost four columns. Beside it is a two column headline, “TRUMP ROLLS OUT VAST NEW ARSENAL OF GLOBAL TARIFFS / Says It Will Restore Fairness as He Takes Aim at Adversaries and Allies.”  They had to get the story out pretty quickly since Trump returned to his old COVID era habit of withholding his most newsworthy daily remarks until after the markets closed, so as not to be seen making the numbers plunge in real time. As a result, despite the dire warnings of economists that it includes in the piece, responding to the initial realization that the tariffs were much higher than people who had hoped Trump might do something remotely normal-looking, had led themselves to expect, the story does not touch on the deeper and much more alarming revelation that the tariff package was so flagrantly amateurish and bungled in its details as to make it clear that its creators weren't just pursuing a bad idea, but were basically faking the whole thing. 

As CNN reports, Trump's targets for tariffs, places that the administration putatively identified through research as trading partners that are taking unfair advantage of the United States include the Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which are getting hit with a 10 % tariff and which are uninhabited. CNN quotes the CIA World Factbook as describing the islands as “80 % ice covered and bleak in the case of Heard Island and the McDonald Islands as small and rocky.”

“On the opposite side of the planet,” CNN writes “the small Norwegian island and former whaling station of Jan Mayen faces 10 % tariffs, but no one lives there permanently. A few military personnel rotate in and it has an economy of zero, according to the CIA Factbook, which calls it a desolate mountainous island. The story also says the British Indian Ocean territory faces a 10 % tariff. It's populated by only about 3000 British and American military personnel and contractors at the Diego Garcia Air Base. The CIA Factbook lists its major export as fish, but it's unclear who does the fishing or who buys it.” 

Back to the front page of the New York Times next to the story about Trump aiming his arsenal of tariffs. On the other side of the political ledger, the liberal win in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election and Democrats relatively strong showing in Florida special elections are good for the headline, “Democrats gains offer a lift to a flailing party.”

The headline next to that is, “Israel Initiates Tactics to Hold Gaza Territory,” which sounds like one of the inscrutable tweets from the guys who cover NBA transactions. What “initiates tactics to hold Gaza territory” means is, as the lead of the story says, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Wednesday that Israel had seized territory in the Gaza Strip, hours after his government laid out plans to take over large parts of the enclave.” 

Inside the paper on page A9, “Shingles vaccine can decrease dementia risk. Study finds / virus is dormant in the nerve cells.” Thanks to a sharp age cutoff in Wales for eligibility for a shingles vaccine. When it came available there, researchers could look at people who were basically the same age, but divided into populations who didn't, didn't get the vaccine. “Over the following seven years, the people who did get the shot were 20 % less likely to develop dementia” the Times, writes, “Than those who were not vaccinated.”

Vaccines. They do wonderful things. I'm sure that this is going to be incorporated into American public health guidance in short order. 

And on page A19, under the somewhat inaccurate page top header, “The 47th president,” is the story, “Report says Columbia protest could have ended without police.” 

“Columbia University's move to use police force to clear demonstrators from a campus building last spring, the Times writes, could potentially have been avoided, as some students were urgently asking if they could leave voluntarily, according to a report released Tuesday by the university's senate. The students, who early that morning had entered Hamilton Hall and barricaded the doors, told faculty intermediaries they had enlisted the help of a Harlem pastor to help them depart safely. But university administrators, saying time had run out, allowed hundreds of police officers to come onto the campus to remove protesters from the building.” 

You have to get to the eleventh paragraph, and the end of that paragraph, before you get reminded of the detail that the police response, in this case, included an officer shooting off a gun inside the building. Or as the Times puts it, “during the ensuing arrests, a police officer accidentally discharged his gun, though no one was hurt.” 

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 along if you're able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.