Good morning. It is August 13th. It is hot and humid in New York City. There are supposed to be thunderstorms on the way in the evening, which are supposed to chase off some of the heat, if not the humidity. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead spot, two columns wide today, is “Ex-Trump Officials Warn Of Manipulation by Putin / Meeting Will Test U.S. Leader, Analysts Say, as He Pushes to End War in Ukraine.” It's a preview piece about the upcoming Trump-Putin summit in Alaska. Is it a summit? I just put the word summit out there because it's a word I've read in the newspaper all my life that seems to go with events like this. “A meeting between heads of government,” says my desktop dictionary. So it seems like a summit then. Anyway, the basic point of the piece is that Vladimir Putin has led Donald Trump around by the nose throughout his presidential careers. And people are skeptical about whether whatever gestures Trump has made about considering Ukraine's sovereignty and interests in any resolution of the Russian invasion of Ukraine can survive face-to-face contact between the two men.

“During Mr. Trump's first term” the Times writes, “he and Mr. Putin met six times in person and had several more phone conversations. His successor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., met Mr. Putin only once in June 2021, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those interactions,” the Times continues, “alarmed many of Mr. Trump's senior aides, who watched as the U.S. president disregarded their advice, excluded them from meetings with the Russian leader, and proposed impractical ideas that appeared to have been planted by Mr. Putin, like creating a US-Russian impenetrable cybersecurity unit. The idea was dropped as soon as Mr. Trump got back to Washington.” Speaking of cybersecurity, on the jump page for that story, the piece beneath it is, “Russia may have participated in a breach of the federal court filing system.” 

“Investigators,” the Times writes, “have uncovered evidence that Russia is at least partly responsible for a recent hack of the computer system that manages federal court documents including highly sensitive records with information that could reveal sources and people charged with national security crimes, according to several people briefed on the breach.” The word “sources” is just sort of hanging there unmodified or explained. The sentence is put together as if it would mean sources charged with national security crimes, but presumably it means sources involved in national security cases. The whole thing seems to have been banged out without a lot of polishing to get some breaking news delivered, but the top of the online version doesn't seem to have been cleaned up any in the hours after the print deadline. The second paragraph is even more impenetrably chaotic. “It is not clear what entity is responsible, whether an arm of Russian intelligence might be behind the intrusion or if other countries were also involved, which some of the people familiar with the matter described as a years long effort to infiltrate the system.”

The word “which” doesn't seem to be pointing to anything in particular there as the sentence is written. Structurally, it would seem to be referring back to other countries Or to the entire prospect of other countries being involved, but neither of those make any sense. The word that the “which” clause seems to want to be about would be Intrusion, but it can't reach it because there's all that stuff about other countries tucked in the way.

The next sentence is, “some of the searches,” what searches are those? There's no prior mention that the intrusion involved searching the database as opposed to just bulk copying the data or something. But, “some of the searches included mid-level criminal cases in the New York City area and several other jurisdictions with some cases involving people with Russian and Eastern European surnames.” Well, this seems like something that will rate some follow-up coverage, so maybe by then they'll be able to edit those stories. 

Back on page one, the rest of the top of the page, four columns wide, is a very nice picture of some National Guard troops trudging along a wide, empty, sun-blasted pathway on the National Mall with some touristy-looking people behind them and the Washington Monument standing tall against a handsome sky with some clouds in it. The head of the troops on the path in the foreground, the picture is someone pulling along some sort of cart set up, under a big shade umbrella. It might be a refreshment cart that's being knocked down for the day, given the length of the shadows. The whole thing is just a really well-chosen and well-composed shot to capture the absolute inanity of the president declaring a crackdown on Washington. The story that goes with it, a WASHINGTON MEMO, has a terrible headline. “With Takeover, Viewing D.C. As a Real Estate Mess to Fix,” but the actual story does not in any way share the headline writers interest in glossing the situation from some imagined version of Trump's point of view. The actual reference to what Trump called his experience from previous life, that he wanted to bring to bear on the purported problems of Washington DC reads, “in that previous life of real estate and business deals, Mr. Trump oversaw many failing businesses including multiple declarations of bankrupt casinos in New Jersey. He was known to invoke crime in a way that stoked racial tension. In 1989, he bought newspaper advertisements, including in the New York Times, calling for New York state to adopt the death penalty after five black and Latino men were arrested and later wrongfully convicted of the rape of a jogger.” That should be “arrested for” and actually the whole later-conviction thing is not well integrated into the flow of the sentence. Anyway. “Even after the men,” the Times writes, “known as the Central Park Five, were exonerated, Mr. Trump never apologized” And the story continues “while he has long denied any discrimination on his Trump properties. His family's business for years faced accusations of discriminating against Black tenants. Mr. Trump opened a hundred million dollar counter suit, accusing the Justice Department of defamation after the federal government in 1973 sued Trump management for discriminating against Black people.”

The story goes on to say, “in his remarks on Monday, Mr. Trump appeared to be espousing the widely debated broken windows theory of policing adopted by city officials during his time in New York, which is based on the idea that cracking down on low level offenses can prevent serious crime. Mr. Trump recalled the lesson from his father, Fred Trump, who mentored him as a real estate developer. “He used to say, son, when you walk into a restaurant and you see a dirty front door, don't go in because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen is dirty also.’ Mr. Trump said. Same thing with the capital. If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty and they don't respect us.” Then it runs through some other fatuous remarks that he made comparing various foreign crises to real estate. But the broken windows point is interesting because it inadvertently loops back to the whole underlying confusion around broken windows policing, which is that the broken windows originally weren't a metaphor. The concept wasn't that having someone commit low-level crime like jumping a subway turnstile, was like having a broken window on a house which needed to be repaired, i.e. forcibly eliminated by law enforcement for the neighborhood to look pleasant. It was that having run down neighborhoods full of broken windows signals that a place is disorderly, unsupervised and uncared for, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If Donald Trump were taking Fred Trump's words literally, if Fred Trump had meant his words to be taken literally, the federal government would be sending out the National Guard with paint rollers and power washers. They'd be building housing for the homeless people so they're not living messy lives out on the street. But when Donald Trump says a place is dirty, what he means is that it has the wrong kind of people in it. And what you do in New York real estate, if you're a certain kind of person, is you chase those people out with the help of the cops, if you can get it. 

Next to that story, the headline is “A Key Inflation Measure Rises, Indicating the Effects of Tariffs.” Who could have seen that coming? 

And down below the fold, there's something about how somebody did a statistical study of baseball that said that Barry Bonds was a better player than Babe Ruth, which is also what the career and single season home run leaderboards say. Although to be fair to Ruth, Bonds wasn't much of a pitcher. 

On the right-hand side of the bottom of the page, on the apparatchik beat again after yesterday's profile of Putin's current hatchet man, the headline is, “An Ivy Leaguer Propels a Siege on Top Schools.” It's about May Mailman, a 37-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer, the Times says, who is leading the administration's attempt to take over and destroy a higher education and is also the architect of the administration's persecution of trans people and various other evil stuff. Seems like a bad person. 

And next to that is a story about some high profile people who are currently advocating for the therapeutic use of ibogaine, the powerful central African hallucinogen derived from tree bark. The person in the lead and the star of the story is the former Texas governor. And in retrospect, emarkably harmless, energy secretary of the first Trump administration, Rick Perry, whom the Times describes getting dosed in Tijuana During which the Times writes “objects flew past him some of them appeared to resemble Maya hieroglyphics. He saw an arm reaching out for him and attached to it was a figure with horns. ‘Satan get behind me,’ he heard himself say the figure instantly disappeared.” Also over the course of what the Times describes as more than 12 hours. The paper writes, “he vomited intermittently and lost much of his body coordination. But he woke up feeling great and purportedly a brain scan that had showed some age-related brain atrophy was followed up by one of a plump and restored brain.” Lest anyone be developing warm feelings toward the drug, the jump part of the story introduces some other advocates, including the former Senator Kirsten Sinema, who the Times describes as “a progressive on social issues who underwent ibogaine treatment in May with the aim of preventing dementia of the sort that claimed her grandmother a few years ago.” Was killing the effort to raise the federal minimum wage a progressive position on a social issue? Maybe that's economics. Anyway, further along, the piece says, even under the most scrupulous of circumstances, ibogaine therapy is a long and grueling inward journey that Ms. Sinema described as the opposite of a pleasant experience. Yeah. Well, sure. Puking your guts out is one thing, but taking a journey inward to the infinitely shallow void of Kirsten Sinema's psyche. HP Lovecraft would cry like a baby. 

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 Socca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Keep on sending those along. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.