Good morning. It is May 16th. It is a sunny, humid morning in New York City as we cycle through what are supposed to be three or four different kinds of weather today, punctuated by a forecast of early afternoon thundershowers, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

President Donald Trump is or will be on his way back from the Middle East to the United States, depending on how one interprets the tenses in the morning news accounts of the president's activities. The return trip will happen on his regular old Air Force One. Forbes ran a very entertaining story yesterday about the luxury jet that Qatar has offered to Trump as a gift, noting that Qatar tried to sell it in 2020 and writing “Qatar, which has given away another blinged out 747 and may have mothballed two more, epitomizes the fading demand for these huge fuel guzzling, highly personalized airplanes. There aren't many who want to buy them, and many of the governments and royal families who own them have been trying to ditch them over the past decade.” The piece notes that the luxury version of the 747-8 cost $23,000 an hour to operate as of 2019, and the plane that they've offered Trump had only 1,069 hours of airtime when it was listed for sale in 2020. “The massive, highly customized planes,” Forbes writes, “with idiosyncratic interior decorating, are not easy to sell. The market is incredibly illiquid for a jet like this, an aerospace consultant told them. The poster child,” Forbes writes, “is a lavish 747-8 commissioned for Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz al-Saud before his death in 2011. It was scrapped for parts in 2022 with just 42 hours of flight time.” The story estimates that it would take five years to strip the plane down and rebuild it to Air Force security specifications, which is so entirely at odds with Trump's desire to get aloft in a swankier jet than the one he has now, that it seems safe to say that whatever happens with the plane, it won't be that. 

Because the old bad news doesn't stop happening just because more new bad news has piled up in front of it, Reuters writes this morning, “food rations that could supply 3.5 million people for a month are moldering in warehouses around the world because of US aid cuts and risk becoming unusable, according to five people familiar with the situation. The food stocks have been stuck inside four US government warehouses since the Trump administration's decision in January to cut global aid programs, according to three people who previously worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development and two sources from other aid organizations.” Reuters reports that the warehouses in Djibouti, South Africa, Dubai and Houston contain somewhere between 60,000 and 66,000 metric tons of food. That's 66,000 to 72,000, 2,000-pound tons. “Sourced,” Reuters writes, “from American farmers and manufacturers and valued at more than $98 million. That food,” Reuters writes, “could feed over a million people for three months, or the entire population of Gaza for a month and a half. A proposal,” the story says, “to hand the stocks to aid organizations that can distribute them is on hold, according to the US source and two former USAID sources briefed on the proposal. The plan is awaiting approval from the State Department's Office of Foreign Assistance, the two former USAID sources said. The office is headed by Jeremy Lewin a 28-year-old former operative of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, who is now overseeing the decommissioning of USAID.” The story goes on to say “nearly 500 tons of high-energy biscuits stored at a USAID warehouse in Dubai are due to expire in July, according to a former USAID official and an aid official familiar with the inventories. The biscuits could feed at least 27,000 acutely malnourished children for a month,” according to Reuters calculations. “The biscuits are now likely to be destroyed or turned into animal feed, the former USAID official said, adding that in a typical year, only around 20 tons of food might be disposed of in this way because of damage in transit or storage.” 

Likewise, the future bad news is going to keep on coming, even if the hubbub of the moment drowns out its approaching footsteps. The Wall Street Journal writes this morning, “the newly appointed head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency acknowledged in private meetings that with two weeks to go until hurricane season, the agency doesn't yet have a fully formed disaster response plan. Dave Richardson, who previously served as a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security and doesn't have a background in emergency management, told staff he would share a hurricane plan with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after he completes it late next week. He said Thursday he's ’80 % to 85 % done’ with the plan. The agency is already months behind schedule and it's for the hurricane season starting June 1st, which is expected to have above normal activity, according to FEMA employees. Richardson,” the Journal goes on, “said in a recent meeting with FEMA staff that clarifying the intent of the president, who has called for terminating the agency, was a challenge in preparing a strategy for hurricane season, according to a video recording of the meeting viewed by the Wall Street Journal. He also seemed to express surprise at the vast range of FEMA's responsibilities, raising concerns among career officials about his ability to run the nation's disaster management agency. Richardson, who leads FEMA in an acting capacity, took over the complex agency last week. ‘I feel a little bit like Bubba from Forrest Gump,’ Richardson said, according to the video. ‘We've got hurricanes, we've got fires, we've got mudslides, we've got flash floods, we've got tornadoes, we've got droughts, we've got heat waves, and now we've got volcanoes to worry about.’”

New Jersey Transit is on strike today, commuter train engineers walked out at midnight after contract negotiations with the state broke down. “New Jersey Transit,” the New York Times writes, “has a contingency plan of supplemental buses, but it doesn't begin until Monday.” 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news story is about the Supreme Court oral arguments yesterday on the nationwide injunction against the Trump administration's attempt to revoke birthright citizenship. “Several of the justices,” the Times writes, “appeared torn between two concerns. They appeared skeptical that single district judges should have the power to freeze executive actions throughout the nation. But they also seemed troubled by the legality and consequences of the executive order underlying the case, an order issued by President Trump on his first day in office ending birthright citizenship or the granting of automatic citizenship to all babies born in the United States.” 

Next to that, in the Who Gets to be American department, he headline is “Trump's Road to a Welcome for Afrikaners.” It begins with John Bolton recalling in his capacity as national security advisor during Trump's first term how Trump floated the idea of rescuing white South African farmers from supposed persecution in 2019. The Times writes, “Mr. Bolton said he thought little of Mr. Trump's wish. ‘The president had embraced fringe ideas and false narratives pushed by white Afrikaner activists,’ Mr. Bolton said. ‘It never amounted to anything, so I just put it as typical Trump,’ Mr. Bolton recalled in a recent interview. ‘Some random person tells him something, and he's obsessed with it.’” This was when the president's brain was six years younger than it is now. But the idea stayed lodged in it. “A convergence of factors has fueled the administration's hostile approach to South Africa,” the Times writes. “They include meetings with Afrikaner activists, a break between the two countries over Israel's war in Gaza, and Mr. Trump's focus on eradicating diversity and inclusion programs that the administration alleges have led to racism against white people.” Yeah, um, you really can't allow your institutional commitment to euphemism and deference to authority figures framing devices, to carry you quite that far. Crime and land politics in South Africa have no discernible connection to diversity and equity programs in the United States, except in as much as people's political positions on both are a way of laundering gutter racism. Saying Trump cares about supposed African or persecution because he cares about DEI is just an incredibly tortured way of saying that the president is a racist crank. His most influential advisors, the times rights include hard right conservatives executing an agenda influenced by white victimhood. Again, you're writing about how these people are racists. Even if your professional norms keep you from calling them racists, you need something less flinchy than that, within the boundaries of—you could probably at least call it an agenda shaped by racial resentment. But white victimhood is just a phantasm. Then the story goes on into a back and forth about whether the specific person who kept this imaginary issue nagging at the president's mind was the professional golfer Gary Player. “When Trump raised the issue of white farmers in the Situation Room,” the Times writes, “Mr. Bolton recalled that the president, while practicing his swing with Mr. Player, had heard that the Afrikaners were being driven from their land.” Gary Player then denies that to the Times and says, through an advisor, he considers all discussions that he has on the golf course as private. You have to get to the third section of the four-section story before Elon Musk, the South African racist, shows up and he only appears in passing. The end of the story circles back to the fundamental racism of it all through the topic of the administration's contention that the Afrikaners, whose ancestors have lived for centuries in Africa, are somehow well suited to assimilate to the United States, ending, after all euphemisms have been exhausted with the president saying, they happen to be white. 

The top of the page has a five column wide photo of a desolate landscape with a soldier standing by an armored vehicle overlooking it. To go with the story on the left hand side of the page, “Border Buildup Trump Ordered Keeps Growing.” It's about how much effort the administration has been putting into live action role playing a border crisis where there is no border crisis.

The Times cites Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, saying that he said that one Marine battalion had been stringing miles of barbed wire across the California mountains. Navy air crews are flying P-8 Poseidons, the most advanced submarine hunting planes in the world, over the desert. Two Navy destroyers are loitering off the West Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, looking for migrant boats in the water. But, the Times continues, “several commanders and some troops stationed along the border said in interviews that serving in one of Mr. Trump's highest priority missions gave them purpose. They are using many of their skills, route planning, mission rehearsals, patrols, surveillance flights, in the real world against criminal smuggling gangs and Mexican drug cartels, instead of just practicing at their home bases or in exercises, they said.” 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. That 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. Keep sending those along if you can. Due to some unavoidable logistical difficulties, the Indignity Morning Podcast is going to be taking an extended weekend and will be off Monday and Tuesday. But if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Wednesday.