Good morning. It is November 20th. It is overcast in New York City with the chance of showers gradually increasing from its longstanding baseline of zero percent, 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 news spot has a two column headline in it over a double bill of stories. “Ukraine hits Russian soil with US-made missiles.” The two stories are basically different mixes of the same story. The right-hand one has news. “Dateline Kiev, Ukraine. Kiev hopes to show more potent arms will pay off.” Classic Timesian retreat to abstract moods and motives there. But that's not news analysis. The news analysis is in the next column over. “Kremlin repackages its nuclear threat.” The writing is pretty straightforward. “On the 1000th day of the war in Ukraine,” David E. Sanger writes, “President Volodymyr Zelensky took advantage of Washington's new willingness to allow long range missiles to be shot deep into Russia. Until this weekend,” the story continues, “President Biden had declined to allow such strikes using American weapons out of fear they could prompt World War III. On the same day, Russia formally announced a new nuclear doctrine that it had signaled two months ago, declaring for the first time that it would use nuclear weapons not only in response to an attack that threatened its survival, but also in response to any attack that posed a critical threat to its sovereignty and territorial integrity, a situation very similar to what was playing out in the Kursk region as American-made ballistic missiles struck Russian weapons arsenals. And,” Sanger goes on, “there was another wrinkle to Russia's guidelines for nuclear use. For the first time, it declared the right to use nuclear weapons against a state that only possesses conventional arms if it is backed by nuclear power.” The story goes on to note that American officials dismissed the doctrine as the nothing-burger of nuclear threats while the city was talking about Matt Gaetz. That's great, but all of this really reads like the exposition titles at the beginning of a really harrowing movie. 

Next to that, more election postmortem. “Broke, dismayed, and distrusting of Democrats.” A tour a minority working class voters who statistically speaking still voted for Democrats, but didn't not vote for Donald Trump to the extent that Kamala Harris campaign hoped they would. But as usual, when the Times sets out to find disaffection with Democrats, the reporting doesn't quite hit the target it professes to be aiming at. The story introduces one Daniel Trujillo, who owns a barbershop in East Las Vegas, who says Democrats flipped. “They went from being for the working class to if you're not college educated and have money, you're not worthy.” And then the story says “he said he had watched with delight as his customers increasingly warmed toward Mr. Trump.” That is the person testifying that the Democrats alienated people. Sounds like he was for Trump in the first place. Then there's a maintenance worker for the city of Las Vegas who the Times reports “moved to Las Vegas from California and was thrilled when he and his wife could wear thug life t-shirts emblazoned with Mr. Trump's face and not elicit nasty remarks from neighbors or friends.” The Times goes on to say that “for months, Democratic operatives suggested that voters like him were merely Trump curious and that most would eventually be repelled by Mr. Trump's coarseness or his hardline immigration proposals.” Really? Democratic consultants said that people like that, specifically, people who own Trump thug life t-shirts and annoy the people around them by wearing them, that's who the democratic consultants deemed persuadable, or that's who you could get for your story, rather than someone who'd actually been on the fence. Then comes one person who complains about the cost of food. Not clear what his party registration is. Then comes a Cuban immigrant who owns three small businesses in Las Vegas, saying he's “a businessman and you've got to run a country like a business. You can't be based off of feelings,” and adds “I feel like right now we're the laughing stock of the world. Like there's no assertiveness in our lives and how we come across to the rest of the world.” Again, not entirely convinced that the guy who talks in Trump rally talking points, the Cuban guy, to boot, was really in play for Kamala Harris. 

Similarly on the inside page facing the jump on that story is “Did school disputes in liberal strongholds help sink Democrats?” In which the Times goes to the Northern Virginia suburbs to see if the backlash over pandemic restrictions and testing policies softened Harris's support. The first voter they talked to works in sales and generally leans Republican. He said that “we voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.” Presumably if he had also voted for Joe Biden in 2020. He would have said so. So this person who appears to have voted for Donald Trump in two consecutive presidential elections says he was motivated by the belief that the stack of lawsuits against Mr. Trump was just ridiculous and that people shouldn't compare Trump to the Nazis. Then comes a person who voted for Barack Obama twice. No mention of Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, who says that “recently he has come to believe that new immigrants are taxing the county's education and health systems, and that Democrats were wrong to argue for years that immigration was not a problem.” It just seems like if you want to talk to voters about why Harris lost support in the Northern Virginia suburbs, you need to find somebody who either went from Biden to Trump or from Biden to staying home. How do people who weren't part of Democrats margins in the first place have anything useful to say about why those margins would shrink? 

Back on page one, on the far left, there's a news analysis column from Peter Baker. With oafish display copy, but a pretty relevant point, “squaring off over hashtag me too Trump defiant as picks face abuse allegations.” Baker writes “when he takes the oath of office in January, Donald J. Trump will make history as the first court adjudicated sexual abuser to assume the presidency. But if he gets the team of his choice, he will not be the only one in the room whose conduct has been called into question. Mr. Trump, who was found liable in a civil trial last year of sexually abusing and defaming the writer, E. Jean Carroll, has selected a defense secretary, an attorney general, a secretary of health and human services, and an efficiency czar, all of whom have been accused of variations of sexual misconduct and, like the president-elect, deny them.” Baker goes on, “the rise of the accused to positions of power raises new questions about the future of the MeToo movement that swept through the country and upended societal expectations in recent years.” Again, the Timesian “raises questions” to mean supplies answers. And the question seems less about the future than about the present and the very recent past. The failure of media and society to hound Trump out of the race for being a rapist was almost certainly a retrenchment of the elite, traumatized by the memory of so many people in positions of authority losing those positions. The consensus among bosses and managers and the people who identify with bosses and managers, that things went too far a few years ago, and that wokeness is out of control and that the rightward lurch is an understandable corrective, all of this stuff has very specific antecedents that the people who push the message prefer not to talk about. 

There's one more data point that would have fit into Baker's story, but it happened after the print deadline and the Times and its online coverage seemed not to be aware that it fit the pattern, and that's the news that Trump named Linda McMahon, secretary of education. The Times is right about the nomination talks about her as a longtime ally of Trump and executive in World Wrestling Entertainment. The head of Trump's small business administration in his first term, a key player in the America first policy Institute, which produced its own equivalent blueprint to the heritage foundations project, and someone with no credentials in education beyond one year on the Connecticut State Board of Education, a decade and a half ago. But it does not mention that Linda McMahon is also a defendant in an ongoing civil lawsuit, accusing her of being complicit in the sexual trafficking of teenage boys who say they were systematically abused with the knowledge of Linda McMahon and her husband, Vince, by the WWE's longtime announcer, Melvin Phillips. The plaintiffs were as young as 13 when they were hired to be ring boys on the wrestling tour. 

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. Our podcasting runs on your subscriptions and tip dollars. So please keep those coming. Be sure and figure out where you put the umbrella. However, many weeks ago you last saw it, and barring anything unforeseen, we will talk again tomorrow.