Good morning. It is August 9th. It is a muggy, soggy, gusty morning in New York City, as we are in fact getting our chewed-over hurricane leftovers. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Donald Trump reclaimed some space on the front of this morning's New York Times. The lead news column is “Trump reinvents platform in a bid to court voters,” a truly impressive example of the Times' institutional commitment to making the Republican presidential nominee sound like a normal politician running a normal campaign, rather than the rambling and fading leader of a toxic political movement. What the story is, in fact, pretty directly about is not some strategic retooling of his policy agenda, but what it politely calls his malleability in election year policymaking, which is to say his reflexive abandonment of previously held positions and embracing brand new ones as he attempts to pander to whoever happens to be standing in front of him at the moment. It leads off with his proposal to eliminate the income tax on tips, noting that his policy when he was last in office, was to have his labor department try to issue a regulation allowing employers to steal and repurpose any tips their employees received above minimum wage. He's also, for various transactional reasons, reversed his stance on TikTok and on cryptocurrencies. “He appears,” the Times writes, “to be staking out new positions to differentiate himself from Vice President Kamala Harris, or perhaps just to please crowds.” What's striking about the story is that it's not just flatteringly framed. It's that even the most negative reading of the story is much more positive than what everyone else's Big Trump story of yesterday was, namely that he ended his prolonged period of media silence by summoning the press to Mar -a -Lago for a press conference, where he said various deranged and demonstrably false things for an hour and also looked extremely gaunt and unhealthy. A little bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted on the website formerly known as Twitter that none of the reporters during that hour asked Trump about last week's Washington Post report that his attorney general Bill Barr had shut down a Justice Department investigation into whether the stretch run of Trump's 2016 campaign was funded by an illegal $10 million payment from the Egyptian security services. The press also avoided asking him questions about his age and his competence, despite his erratic performance and unhealthy appearance. The only information from the news conference that the Times seemed to extract for the print edition was that Trump, after backing out of his scheduled ABC presidential debate, backed into it again, and is now scheduled to debate Kamala Harris on September 10th. 

Trump's decline does make a story on page A15, under the headline “Allies find Trump distracted following upheaval of race,” which describes essentially the Republican version of the situation the Democrats had with Joe Biden from the first debate onward, in which they're panicking about the inability of their candidate to engage with his opponent. “The way Republicans see it,” the Times writes, “it should not be hard for Mr. Trump to pivot from President Biden to this new Democratic ticket. All he has to do is hammer Ms. Harris and Mr. Walls for things they have said and done to paint them as out of step for most Americans on everything including policing, immigration, and transgender policies.” It's not quite that simple as in the online version of the story, “Transgender policies” links to a story about how Republicans tried and failed to make Walz's initiative providing menstrual products in public schools into an anti -trans wedge issue. Anyway, the story continues, “but lately Mr. Trump keeps getting tangled up in distractions of his own making. He has gone on tangents about Ms. Harris's biracial identity. He has picked fights with fellow Republicans. He has fantasized that Mr. Biden might somehow snatch back the nomination.” All of which is broadly true, but the idea that it's of his own making seems a little off. As with the TikTok and the crypto in the lead news story, Trump's racism and conspiracism are servicing the people he thinks he needs to service. His campaign can't act like a normal campaign because it's been built from the beginning around being abnormal. 

Elsewhere on page one, there's the headline, “In Congresswoman's defeat, Israel lobby shows its clout.” About the defeat of Missouri representative Cory Bush this week in her primary, as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent millions and millions of dollars to promote her opponent. Apparently we're still on the stage of the discourse cycle when saying the Israel lobby shows its clout is a welcome affirmation of the anti -Palestinian consensus in national politics, rather than a vile anti -Semitic trope about dual loyalties and the influence of Jewish money. Let Cory Bush recite the exact text of the New York Times headline a week from now and see what AIPAC says about it then. 

And on page one, there's also a story where form imitates substance. “Paris strategy of the Dutch, fist taps only” is the headline. On an Olympic dispatch from Paris about how the Netherlands delegation is avoiding handshakes, high fives and hugs. The Dutch approach is, of course, a legacy of the one word that nobody involved with the Paris Games likes to mention, the times writes, coronavirus. The story then goes on to talk about the bureaucratic COVID maze and the testing and masking protocols that prevailed at the previous winter and summer Olympics, and how athletes who tested positive there were isolated, then contrasts it with the laissez -faire approach in Paris. And only after all that does the story get around to saying “As much as nobody has been especially eager to talk about it, the virus that derailed the last two Olympics has been a factor in Paris. The World Health Organization reported this week that at least 40 athletes had tested positive for COVID -19 or another respiratory illness, a figure based on a scan of reports from the news media and other verified sources, rather than comprehensive testing.” The story then rounds up some cases of athletes catching the virus. But, in the late pandemic Olympic spirit, it does not mention Noah Lyles of the United States, who, rather than adding a gold medal in the 200 meters to his gold medal in the 100, had to settle for bronze and left the track in a wheelchair because he'd caught COVID in between his two events. Not only is the pandemic still in effect, but by all appearances, it's truly raging right now here, just like in Paris. So make like Katie Ledecky and wear a mask. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. Your Indignity Morning podcast will be on the road next week and may or may not be recording. But if all goes well sooner or later, we will talk to you again.