Good morning. It is October 15th. The real autumn chill has arrived in New York City and this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. Major news outlets this morning are grappling with how to present the story of how Donald Trump got weird at what was supposed to be a town hall last night. 

The Washington Post headline online is “Trump Sways and Bops to Music for 39 minutes in bizarre town hall episode.” The Times went with “Trump bobs his head to music for 30 minutes in odd town hall detour.” It's the subheads that really capture the divergence in how they're approaching it. The Post writes, “Vice President Kamala Harris has called Trump 78, unstable and questioned his mental acuity.” They still have to ventriloquize the question of whether Trump is coming apart mentally to turn it into a back and forth issue between the candidates, but they're talking about it. 

While the Times went with, “After multiple interruptions, Donald Trump cut off questions and seemed to decide that it would be more enjoyable for all concerned, and, it appeared, for himself, if he fired up his campaign playlist.” This story goes on to describe the event as one in which “Mr. Trump, a political candidate known for improvisational departures, made a detour.” But a detour generally goes somewhere else, and then continues on toward a destination. Whereas what happened last night was that after two people fainted in the audience, Trump just sort of gave up. As the Times itself allows later on, “Mr. Trump generally returns to his planned remarks after medical issues at other events. On Monday, he seemed more uncertain how to proceed. After offering what appeared to be a closing statement,” the Times writes, “and having his campaign play a James Brown song, Mr. Trump suggested taking another question or two. As the crowd cheered in approval, he said, ‘let's go,’ but then said he'd play YMCA and send the crowd home. But, after YMCA ended, Mr. Trump seemed a little perplexed. ‘There's nobody leaving,’ he said. ‘What's going on?’” What was going on? 

The most charitable reading would seem to be that Trump was worn out and couldn't bring himself to go through the motions of a normal campaign event anymore. That no matter what the polls say, he smells the pointlessness of it all and understands he shouldn't be president again and doesn't really want to, and you can ask Joe Biden what the less charitable explanations might be. 

On the front page of this morning's New York Times, the lead news story, two columns wide, is “Captured by Israeli army and used as living shields. Palestinians forced to do dangerous tasks, soldiers and former detainees say.” The opening anecdote is about a 17-year-old high school student who was forced to enter a booby-trapped building by the IDF. “While the extent and scale of such operations are unknown,” the Times writes, “the practice, illegal under both Israeli and international law, has been used by at least 11 squads in five cities in Gaza, often with the involvement of officers from Israeli intelligence agencies.” The story goes on to say the Times interviewed “seven Israeli soldiers who observed or participated in the practice and presented it as routine, commonplace, and organized, conducted with considerable logistical support and the knowledge of superiors on the battlefield.” Later on, the story notes, “accused of acting without enough concern for civilian casualties, Israel has defended itself by saying that Hamas embeds its fighters and weapons in civilian areas, effectively using entire communities as human shields.”

The teenage boy in the lead of the story tells the times that after his father was killed by shelling and his 15 year old sister was shot dead by Israeli troops, he was captured and sent to wander the streets of Khan Yunis accompanied by only a small overhead drone known as a quadcopter. The drone monitored his movements and issued instructions to him from its loudspeaker. 

Next to the jump of that story on page A7, down at the bottom, “After attacks, UN declares its bases must be respected.” This is the UN's response to Israeli forces attacking UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on social media, ““The inviolability of U.N. premises must be respected at all times,” Mr. Guterres said in a statement on social media on Sunday. “Attacks against peacekeepers are in breach of international law and may constitute a war crime.” These stories keep talking about people breaking international law, but nobody makes any international arrests.

Back on page one, the Times' Trump campaign trail reporter, Sean McCrish, files a story that's probably worth writing about. The headline is, “Some Believe in Trump Without Believing Him.” And the gist is that he went to the people in the audience at a Trump appearance, the one with Detroit Economic Club, and asked them how they feel about mass deportations, government purges, and the various other things that Trump has been promising from the campaign trail. And they all said that they don't really believe he's going to do it, and they just think he's going to be good for business. And so the Trump campaign continues on in its perfectly protected spot where no one acknowledges the truth of what he did in his first four years as president, and no one accepts what he says about what he would do with four more. 

Nicely placed under that on the jump page, “Another recipient of Trump's clemency faces new felony charges. A Florida man who received a commutation of a 20-year fraud sentence from President Donald J. Trump in 2020, only to plead guilty this year to a related crime, was arrested on Sunday on domestic violence-related charges in South Florida. He is,” the Times notes, “at least the seventh person granted clemency by Mr. Trump, who has been charged with new crimes after receiving a second chance,” according to a New York Times analysis. If he wins, it's all going to go exactly how you know it's going to go, but people will still act surprised.

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. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.