Good morning. It is May 23rd. It is another dark and chilly morning in New York City on the way into what is forecast to be a cloudy and chilly Memorial Day weekend, with the exception perhaps of Memorial Day itself, 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 started his day by posting about tariffs again. First, he put up a message that he would tariff Apple products at least 25%. If they were not, as he said, “manufactured and built in the United States, not India or any place else,” he added. Then he followed that by posting that he would be recommending, whatever “recommending” means in the context of his legally dubious crusade to wage an entire trade war without congressional approval, a straight 50 % tariff on the European Union, in his words, “starting June 1st.” The markets immediately dropped. 

The Supreme Court's Republican majority, under cover of a brief procedural decision on its shadow docket, functionally gutted the 90-year-old precedent in Humphrey's Executor versus the United States, which had denied presidents the power to fire the board members of independent nonpartisan agencies. Rather than actually reversing Humphrey's executor, the majority simply ordered that Trump's illegal attempted firings of Democratic-appointed members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board be allowed to take effect while their cases challenging the firing were being heard. Their reasoning, briefly stated, was that it was more damaging to block a president from taking an action that he wanted to take, then it would be for these people to lose their jobs and have to get their jobs back later if they won. Framing the argument that way sidestepped the fact that the president had unquestionably violated the law as it currently stands. The majority effectively confessed to how wrong it knew the decision was, by including an unsupported assertion that somehow, the ruling they had issued would not applied to the Federal Reserve Board, in the event that a president were to try to fire one of its members. Like the caveat in Bush v Gore that that decision only applied to the 2000 election and not to future ones, the carve out for the feds was simply the court's way of making a blatantly political decision even more political in the guise of denying its political consequences. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news column catches up with yesterday's news about the House passing Donald Trump's budget. “TIGHT HOUSE VOTE PASSES DEEP CUTS IN TAXES AND AID / A VICTORY FOR TRUMP / Rougher Road Expected as Domestic Agenda Goes to Senate.” The Times writes about the substance of the bill. “The legislation would slash taxes, steer more money to the military and border security, and pay for some of the cost with cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education, and clean energy programs, adding significantly to federal deficits and to the ranks of the uninsured. It would also raise the debt limit by $4 trillion, allowing the government to continue borrowing to finance its obligations.” And only after that does it recast it as something that “set the stage for bruising political attacks ahead of next year's midterm elections,” et cetera. 

In the second news column, it's “Harvard Loses Ability to Take Any Foreigners / Trump Targets Critical Funding Source.” Here, again, still, the headline is doing the administration's work for it. The lead of the story gets the verbs and their relationship to legal reality more accurate. “The Trump administration on Thursday said it would halt Harvard University's ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation's oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation of the administration's efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president's agenda. The administration notified Harvard about the decision,” the Times writes, “which could affect about a quarter of the school's student body after a back and forth in recent weeks over the legality of a sprawling records request as part of the Department of Homeland Security's investigation, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations.” The entire course of the second Trump administration so far has been defined by the administration asserting that it is doing things as a way of jumping right over the question of whether it is legally able to do those things. Right now, Harvard hasn't lost the ability to take foreign students. Right now, Harvard has simply been given an occasion to file one more lawsuit defending itself against the actions the administration professes to have the power to carry out. Preserving those distinctions is the essence of defending the rule of law against the arbitrary authoritarianism of the White House.

For an instructive contrast of approach, there is the lawsuit filed yesterday by Shira Perlmutter, on the question of who is in charge of the United States Copyright Office, in which the plaintiff identifies herself as Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office, while naming the defendants Todd Blanch “in his capacity as the person claiming to be Acting Librarian of Congress” and Paul Perkins “in his capacity as the person claiming to be the register of copyrights.” Just because Donald Trump says he's taken a job away from someone and given it to someone else, that doesn't mean change is reportable as a fact in its own right. 

The rest of the top of the front page is taken up by a four-column headline and photograph. “2 Killed Near Jewish Museum Were Shot Repeatedly.” The package unfolds two stories, one straight news story, albeit with a feature-ized narrative lead. We're counting the shooting in bit by bit detail, describing the shooter beforehand as someone who looked just like another young Washingtonian, even though the only named sourcing for any of the detail is an FBI affidavit that cited surveillance video. 

Next to that is a profile of the victims, Yaron Lishinsky and Sarah Milgrim, who had been planning to get engaged. Lishinsky is described as a devout Christian in the piece. And Milgrim's father, according to the Times, said that “his daughter and Mr. Lishinsky were both concerned about peace in the Middle East, the stability of Israel, and the plight of the Palestinians.” 

Down below the fold on the front page, on the right-hand side, the Times does a little more of its deferential packaging. In this case, it may think it's being arch. “Report From Kennedy Delivers A Grim Picture of Youth Health.”

“President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, the Times writes, “set forth their vision on Thursday for how to ‘make America healthy again’ with the release of an expansive report on a crisis of chronic disease in children. The report,” the Times continues, “lays the blame on ultra-processed foods, chemical exposures, stress, lack of physical activity, and excessive use of prescription drugs, including antidepressants. The product of a presidential commission led by Mr. Kennedy,”—that was pretty fast since he's only been on the job for a few months,—“the report paints a bleak picture of American children,” the Times writes, “calling them ‘the sickest generation in American history.’ Rather than set out specific policy prescriptions, it offers up carefully selected studies and proposes new research. But,” the story goes on, “it is unmistakably Mr. Kennedy's worldview, echoing many of the talking points”—em-dash—“some intensely disputed”—em-dash—“that the health secretary, a former environmental lawyer and outspoken vaccine skeptic, has repeated for decades.”

Four paragraphs in,  ha, is where the Times sees fit to provide any information about the merits of the report put out by a Health and Human Services secretary who is a conspiratorial crank who's organized his worldview around false, nonsensical, and dangerous quackery. You have to get past the jump before the story tells you, “in some cases, the report misrepresents existing scientific consensus. It implies, for example, that the increase in routine immunizations given to children may be harmful to them, which many scientists say is based on an incorrect understanding of immunology. It calls for further scientific inquiry into the links between vaccines and chronic disease, despite dozens of studies that have failed to find a link.” 

Feels like the Secretary of Health and Human Services putting out a report that mounts an attack on vaccination could have figured more prominently in the account of what exactly the news here was. 

Next to that, the Times reports on the Trump administration's internal deliberations about the case of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia. “Inside Deportation Feud: ‘Keep Him Where He Is.’” After the Department of Homeland Security realized that it had violated a judge's order by deporting Abrego-Garcia to El Salvador, the Times describes how, as the story says, “DHS officials floated a series of ideas to control the story that raised alarms among Justice Department lawyers on the case. In the days before the government's error became public, DHS officials discussed trying to portray Mr. Abrego-Garcia as a “leader” of the violent street gang MS-13, even though they could find no evidence to support the claim. They considered ways to nullify the original order that barred his deportation to El Salvador. They sought to downplay the danger he might face in one of that country's most notorious prisons. And in the end, a senior justice department lawyer, Erez Reuveni, who counseled bringing Mr. Abrego-Garcia back to the United States, was fired for what Attorney General Pam Bondi said was ‘a failure to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.’” How Bondi and the larger administration construe “zealous advocacy” is captured in a pair of back-to-back paragraphs. “‘This was an administrative error,’ James Percival, a DHS official appointed by Mr. Trump, wrote to his colleagues on March 30th. ‘Not that we should say publicly.’ That last part's in parentheses. “Trisha McLaughlin, a DHS spokeswoman, said in a statement that Mr. Abrego Garcia's deportation was part of ‘a highly sensitive counterterrorism operation with national security implications.’” One set of facts for the inside, a different set of facts for the outside. 

McLaughlin, as is her habit, keeps right on going, turning the damning email into a pro-administration talking point. “‘We invoked the state secret's privilege over many of the details. Of course, our officials discussed what should be divulged publicly,’ she added. ‘This just proves they are responsible public servants putting the safety of the American people first. The leakers of these emails, on the other hand, clearly do not care about public safety.’” 

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. Keep sending those in if you are able. Have a great holiday weekend, and don't miss it if the clouds happen to break. And if nothing too unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Tuesday.