Good morning. It is April 4th. It is a sweltering morning in New York City, cloudy and maximally humid. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The South Korean constitutional court threw impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, out of office, unanimously ruling that his unfounded declaration of martial law in December was, as CNN quotes the court, “a grave betrayal of the people's trust.” 

“The court's acting head judge, Moon Hyung-bae,” CNN writes, pointed to the chaotic night of December 3rd when the president sent troops to parliament and ordered soldiers to drag out lawmakers, noting that such actions cannot be justified. There was no national emergency, said Moon, and such a decree was simply unconstitutional. South Korea is now supposed to elect a new president within 60 days.” 

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted at the opening bell once again, dropping below 40,000 as the markets continued to reel from President Donald Trump's declaration that a national emergency compelled him to launch a global trade war. Yesterday's market plunge takes up five out of the six columns across the front of the New York Times, “TARIFF SHOCK WAVES CIRCLE THE GLOBE.” There's a big graph of how various stock markets have performed since Donald Trump's inauguration, with everyone on the chart except China going into freefall yesterday. The rightmost news column is “Markets Dive as
Countries Vow Reprisal.” 

“The scale of President Trump's global tariffs began to sink in on Thursday,” the Times writes, “as stock markets fell sharply, countries warned of retaliation, and American companies and consumers braced for the impact on their bottom lines and bank accounts. China,” the Times writes, “one of the country's hardest hit by the tariffs, vowed to take countermeasures to safeguard its own rights and interests. Its state media described the tariffs as self-defeating bullying. South Korea convened an emergency task force and vowed to pour all government resources to overcome a trade crisis. In Brussels, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, said, ‘if you take on one of us, you take on all of us.’ President Emmanuel Macron of France called on European companies to suspend all investment in the United States until things have been clarified over the tariffs.” In the adjoining column, the headline is “Turning Longtime Grievance Into Emergency.” 

“President Trump upended the international trading system this week with a blunt package of global tariffs, making the case that the United States faces a dire economic emergency as a result of trade imbalances with countries across the globe.” Did he make a case or did he just make a claim? The next paragraph might be of interest to anyone challenging his application of emergency powers. 

“It's a sentiment that Mr. Trump has expressed for decades, one that helped propel him to the presidency amid anger over lost manufacturing jobs and widening trade deficits.” Boy, “amid” is certainly finessing a lot right there. “While the United States has the largest and strongest economy in the world,” the Times continues, “Mr. Trump and many of his supporters have long held the view that America has been ripped off by other countries and the tariffs are the answer to rectify decades of what they call unfair treatment that has shuttered factories, decimated communities and hurt workers.” 

It's that kind of emergency. A structural emergency that's been going on for 50 years that had to be addressed by presidential rather than congressional action. The left-hand column of page one is occupied by a whole other piece of Trump news. “Trump Fires 6 After Meeting With Activist / Far-Right Figure’s Eye on Security Council.”

“President Trump,” the Times writes, “fired six National Security Council officers after an extraordinary meeting in the Oval Office with the far-right activist Laura Loomer.” 

I guess “far-right activist” is reasonably accurate, or to the extent it's an insufficient description, that insufficiency is just sort of a reflection of the limits of available language and concepts to provide a concise epithet for Laura Loomer that could fit into the flow of a news lead. I could try out some New York Times inappropriate alternatives like “Far Right Maniac” or “Unhinged Online Influencer,” but really the description of Laura Loomer isn't written in ink. It's written in what your adrenal glands produce when you encounter someone who is comprehensively, horrifyingly wrong in their deepest substance. 

Anyway, “the far-right activist Laura Loomer, who laid out a list of people she believed were disloyal to the president, U.S. officials said on Thursday. The firings,” the Times continues, “were described by one of the U.S. officials who had direct knowledge of the matter. The decision came after Ms. Loomer vilified the staff members by name during the meeting on Wednesday when she walked into the White House with a sheaf of papers attacking the character and loyalty of numerous NSC officials. Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, joined later in the meeting and briefly defended some of his staff, though was clear he had little, if any, power to protect their jobs. It was,” the Times continues, understating it, “a remarkable spectacle. Ms. Loomer, who has floated the baseless conspiracy theory that the September 11 attacks were an inside job and is viewed as extreme even by some of Mr. Trump's far-right allies, was apparently wielding more influence over the staff of the National Security Council than Mr. Walz, who runs it.”

Down below the fold, the lead is “the Trump administration threatened on Thursday to withhold federal funding from public schools unless state education officials verified the elimination of all programs that it said unfairly promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion. In a memo sent to top public education officials across the country, the education department said that funding for schools with high percentages of low-income students, known as Title I funding, was at risk pending compliance with the administration's directive. The memo included a certification letter that state and local school officials must sign and return to the department within 10 days, even as the administration has struggled to define which programs would violate its interpretation of civil rights laws.” 

This seems like the latest iteration of the thing that's going on throughout the government, where the people who haven't been laid off have to drop all their actual duties to meet the demands of the administration's re-segregationist program. 

Inside the paper on page A10, the NEWS ANALYSIS headline is, “A second term risk taker tests bounds, no matter the cost.” The Times gets a lot of heat for allowing the reactionary assumptions built into what it considers its liberal point of view to provide cover for Trump, but this one reflects a slightly different problem, namely the interaction between the paper's taste for euphemism and the fact that as an institution populated by the kind of people who choose to work for the most important and powerful entity in their profession, the Times believes that calling someone a “risk taker” or saying they're “unconstrained by norms” and “ready to upset existing practices” is self-evidently a bad thing, rather than being the normal rhetorical framework for putting a positive spin on aggression and ambition in America. 

“Only 10 weeks into his presidency, President Trump's appetite for risk seems to know few bounds. He imposed sweeping global tariffs on Wednesday, despite fears of inflation, or worse, stagflation. Yet the man who propelled himself to the presidency as a hard-nosed dealmaker sounded cavalier last weekend when asked if he was worried the price of cars could surge. ‘I couldn't care less,’ Mr. Trump replied.” The story goes on. “It was the latest example of his willingness to take a maximalist position, essentially daring his opponents to take him on. Before the tariffs announcement, he moved to blow up a global alliance system the United States spent 80 years building, embassy by embassy, silencing voice of America and mostly removing the government from the business of providing food and medical aid. Mr. Trump,” the Times writes, “is more than willing to test the boundaries of a 250-year-old democracy to retaliate against perceived enemies or eviscerate parts of the federal government, even if that means risking the public health system or ignoring due process for immigrants living in the country legally.” 

Appetite for risk. Sweeping tariffs. Willingness to take a maximalist position. Daring his opponents. Willing to test the boundaries. This is all exactly how Donald Trump would like to describe himself. At worst, the argument here is simply that Donald Trump is boldly making damaging decisions. There's a rather glaring piece of the puzzle missing from this account. And the closest the Times comes to it is down toward the bottom of the first column, where after describing how Trump was more restrained in his first term, the Times writes, “when asked why the second term is unfolding so differently, the people around Mr. Trump, almost all insisting that they must speak anonymously, say that the legal, electoral, and psychological restraints that bound him in the past are gone.” 

The paper casts this in terms of a sense of destiny after he survived the assassination attempt on the campaign trail, and a sense of liberation brought on by the Supreme Court's grant of broad presidential immunity and his having won his last constitutionally permissible election. But the word “psychological” just sort of flickers by with no real reference to the fact that he's visibly decrepit, unfocused, unable to control his impulses, and has apparently given up on even trying to assimilate any kind of unwelcome new information. 

You don't take grandpa's car keys because he's too daring at the wheel. You take them because he's not fit to operate the car anymore. 

Congratulations to the people of South Korea for their ability to recognize when a thing is what it is. 

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. Please continue sending those along if you can. Try to stay dry this weekend. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.