Good morning. It is July 16th. It is a hot, hot morning in New York City. It's a hot morning everywhere. And this is your Indignity Morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. How hot is it? The National Weather Service's heat risk map is running red and magenta, basically up the entire eastern seaboard for major and extreme heat, dropping off to orange in the Appalachians proper and then turning red again on the far side of the mountains. Basically the red zone stretches from Lubbock, Texas to Bangor, Maine and the magenta goes from the North Carolina-South Carolina border nearly nonstop to the outskirts of New York. Drink your water and don't go do stuff if you don't have to go do stuff. 

In the newspaper this morning, the New York Times print edition confronts the reality of what a new Trump era would be like by finding itself too swamped with news to put it into a hierarchy. Presented with Judge Aileen Cannon's completely lawless decision throwing out Trump's indictment in the classified documents case and with Trump's selection of fake hillbilly far-right freak JD Vance as his running mate, the Times just split the front page. 

The document case debacle gets the usual lead slot, two columns wide on the right, but Vance gets four columns across the left -hand side of the page with a headline written into the passive voice to make sure it's long enough to stack. “Vance, a one -time critic of Trump, is selected as his running mate.” Cannon, in her tighter space, got the active voice in “Judge voids case about documents that Trump kept,” although the subheadline goes double passive, “special counsel's appointment is ruled improper and appeal is planned.” Anyway, we talked about Cannon yesterday, when it happened, as for Vance, congratulations to all the news writers who filed their stories last week about how Donald Trump was moderating his party's position on abortion. Apparently Trump feels so confident about Joe Biden's polling, that despite the heavy down-ballot activation around the abortion issue, he went ahead with a chin-bearded adult Catholic convert who's obsessed with keeping out immigrants and raising the breeding rate among existing Americans. 

In other policy news right below the fold “for the GOP, free market economics is history,” “platform teaches ideals for policies risking inflation and debt.” “The platform,” the Times writes, “lacks policy ideas that have long been dear to economic conservatives, the platform does not directly mention fiscal deficits and apart from curbing government spending, it does not make any clear and detailed promises to reign in the nation’s borrowing. Other policies it proposes, including cutting taxes and expanding the military, would most likely swell the nation’s debt.”

Okay, I know that the point here is what they wrote down in the platform, but Republicans have been expanding the military, cutting taxes and raising spending to increase the deficit and the debt since before JD Vance, age 39, was born. It's mildly interesting, I guess, that they're no longer even paying lip service to the thing that they have manifestly never done. But it's pretty strange to take that lip service at face value. 

Elsewhere on page one, there's a look at Japanese school children's book bags, a perfectly charming little feature story pegged to absolutely nothing, and then much more cable news style vamping, filling space instead of time to show that the news desk is still paying attention to the very important assassination attempt against Donald Trump, even though there's really not much to say about it. Everybody knew within 24 hours that the Secret Service had somehow let a 20 year old guy with no particular tactical expertise get a clear headshot at the presidential candidate.

So for the second straight day, there's a front page story about how that's a really bad thing for the Secret Service to have done. But, they do keep doing stuff like that one way or another, and there's not really anything new to say about it today. 

Likewise, right next to that, first gunshots, moments later, disinformation. I forget, but I think there were two versions of that story in yesterday's paper. Not only is it not really news about the shooting, it's not really news about anything that ever happens. People spread lies for clout and political advantage, and when something focuses everyone's attention, that's one more opportunity to tell them lies. 

Inside the paper, there's page after page of more vamping. “Republican allies place shooting in Trump's persecution narrative.” You don't say. “How the attempted assassination unfolded minute by minute.” Well, you see this guy crawled up on a roof with a gun, and then he shot at Donald Trump and he hit him in the ear, and killed another guy and then the Secret Service shot the shooter and that's how the assassination unfolded minute by minute, just like everyone pretty much knew about two hours after it happened. 

There's a critics notebook about the striking photography that emerged from the shooting that everyone has already seen and absorbed it's compared here to Delacroix's “liberty leading the people,” “in pictures divorced from swirling chaos a suggestion of fearlessness is conveyed.” Passive voice and it's just a suggestion. And then let's see. “House begins inquiries to demand answers in assassination attempt.” That's a whole different story from Secret Service faces scrutiny. “Trump said he was saved by chart, doctor recalls.” Subhead, “a turn of the head may have spared the former president.” Somehow this story is six columns wide, even though that's literally the only idea in it.

Speaking of which, right above it, also spanning the width of the page, “investigators looking at cell phone in hopes of discovering a motive.” There, they can't even make it through the headline without resorting to padding. “The FBI has unlocked the shooter's phone.” That's it. That's the only news. No word on what they're getting. All this crap could have been squeezed down into one news story, and it wouldn't even have needed to be very long one. But that is the news. Thank you for listening.

Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. Stay out of the sun. And if all goes well, we'll talk again tomorrow.