Good morning. It is September 30th. It's another warm and mostly cloudy morning 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. 

At midnight tonight, unless there is some sudden successful negotiation where pretty much no negotiation at all is going on, the federal government is due to shut down as it passes the deadline for appropriating funding. Not one of the stories on the front of this morning's New York Times is about the fact that the government is on the brink of a shutdown. The sole mention of it is a referral down at the bottom of the page. The third listed story in the national section, “High Stakes in Spending Fight, The top four leaders on Capitol Hill are each facing political risks and competing incentives as the government barrels toward a shutdown,” sending the reader to page A16 to read about it. 

President Donald Trump, likewise, put the whole question of the government shutdown out of his mind and spent the morning trailing after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to address the hundreds of admirals and generals that Hegseth had summoned from around the world to Quantico for a hastily scheduled address. That address turned out to be Hegseth bragging about his own physical fitness and delivering his by now established spiel about rejecting diversity and accountability and making the armed forces conform to his vision of what a lethal military should be. He reiterated his opposition to beards in the military, generally understood to be an attack on black service members who may need exemptions from shaving rules because of skin irritation. And he rejected the idea that United States military operations should observe scrupulous rules of engagement, that the armed forces should encourage reports of abuse and misconduct, and that adverse information about misconduct should be kept in someone's service record. The anti-accountability positioning was not exactly a surprise coming from someone who's been widely and specifically abused of being an alcoholic, a rapist, and a spousal abuser. The assembled military leaders received all this, including the part where Hegseth proudly and gleefully declared that potential foreign adversaries would henceforth FAFO with stony professional silence. The president got the same treatment as he went up and rambled his way through a version of his rally schtick, the only kind of speech he knows how to give anymore, in which he told them he would be using the military in American cities in what he described as a war from within. “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” the president said. 

What did make it onto the front of the morning newspaper if the government shutdown didn't rate? With one big exception, the news is all pretty important news. The photograph at the top of the page is of a slack faced Trump with a grinning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Over a left-hand NEWS ANALYSIS column, Plan for Gaza, With a Threat / A Truce or Destruction, Trump Warns Hamas.” The NEWS ANALYSIS tag, headline packaging, and the lead all get a little bit ahead of themselves. “President Trump on Monday cast his plan for a ceasefire in Gaza as a landmark deal to bring peace after two years of catastrophic violence,” the Times writes. “But in reality, it was more like an ultimatum to Hamas.”

“His plan in Gaza,” presented as the object in the sentence, was in fact the news event. As the second paragraph gets around to telling the reader, “standing alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Mr. Trump unveiled a proposal to which both men had agreed. If Hamas refuses to do the same, Mr. Trump said,”— presumably by do the same, they mean agree and not unveil a proposal, although that's not really how the sentence is written— “If Hamas refuses to do the same, Mr. Trump said, ‘the United States will let Israel do what you would have to do. Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas,’ said Mr. Trump, who under the plan would become the temporary chairman of a board in charge of the redevelopment of Gaza.” 

Specifically, and once again, the Times pushes back the specifics to deepen the story so as not to challenge the reader of the newspaper with information, where it can give vague paraphrases of information instead, that board would be called the Board of Peace. And it would also include Tony Blair. The proposal does not call for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and removal of Palestinians, just for Hamas to surrender and to agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza directly, indirectly, or in any form. Only after this program of political and military demobilization is fully carried out, does the proposal say the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people? Who could say no to a promise as firm as that? 

Next to that story in page one, the headline is, “Rubio Shapes a U.S. Strategy to Remove Venezuela's Leader.” In the fractured apportionment of power under a senile and incompetent president, it looks like every individual who can is seizing the opportunity to put across their maximum agenda. And in this case, that would be Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who notoriously falsely pretends his family was exiled by the Cuban revolution, pandering to right-wing Latino emigres by aiming to overthrow the government of Venezuela. 

Next to that one, the headline is “Trump Dragnet Is Sweeping Up Citizens of U.S., U.S. citizens, many of them Latino men, have been stopped and in some cases taken into custody by law enforcement officers who are carrying out President Trump's immigration crackdown and who suspect the men are living in the country illegally. While many of those detained have immediately declared their U.S. citizenship to officers, they have routinely been ignored according to interviews with the men, their lawyers, and court documents.” Interviews with court documents? They really don't copy-edit the dang front page at all, do they? Anyway...

“In some cases,” the story continues, “they have been handcuffed, kept in holding cells in immigration facilities overnight, and in at least two cases held without access to a lawyer or even a phone call.” The story does a nice job of describing some of these encounters, including an 18-year-old born in West Palm Beach. “You got no rights here.” 

Straining the Times' formal politeness past the limit, the story goes on to say, “during some immigration sweeps in heavily Latino communities, particularly in Southern California, federal agents have roamed the streets, courthouses, and workplaces demanding proof of citizenship from residents. The roving patrols and impromptu interrogations have been a striking departure from the understanding that the Constitution allows citizens to remain silent and places limits on who officers can question, hold, and detain.” By “understanding,” what they mean is “law,” or at least what the law used to be until the Supreme Court got involved. While the story does explain that the Supreme Court halted a lower court's order to stop agents from targeting people based on perceived ethnicity, it does not quote the opinion that Justice Brett Kavanaugh submitted in support of that action, in which he argued that “the interests of individuals who are illegally in the country in avoiding being stopped by law enforcement for questioning is ultimately an interest in evading the law that is not an especially weighty interest” and added “as for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are US citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.” Left-leaning legal social media has been working on trying to get people to start calling this process of jacking people up and demanding their papers or dragging them off the street and not even bothering to check their papers till later, a “Kavanaugh stop.” 

And next to that, just above the fold on the right hand side of the page, is a piece about Russell Vought of Project 2025, “Ticking Boxes on His Checklist
To Make Trump All-Powerful,” a long look at how Vought, the White House budget director, has implemented a scheme to vest unprecedented power, including the power to rewrite spending on the fly, in the unitary executive. Early on, this story also contains the revelation that while the power may be unitary, the executive is not. 

Again, in the absence of a lucid and engaged president, there's a free for all as to who gets to use those powers in his name. And so the story begins with the revelation that Vought “was preparing the Trump administration's 2026 budget proposal this spring when his staff got some surprising news. Elon Musk's cost-cutting team was unilaterally axing items that Mr. Vought had intended to keep. Mr. Vought, in numbers wonk, who rarely raises his voice, could barely contain his frustration, telling colleagues that he felt sidelined and undermined by the haphazard chaos of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency. According to six people with knowledge of his comments, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.” 

Down below that is a sassily written obituary for Eric Adams's political career, “Swaggering and Scandalous, a Singular Mayor / For Four Years, Adams
Took New Yorkers on Tumultuous Ride.” Sure, why not? “It can be said,” the Times writes, “that no other mayor had his eyebrows threaded in public, claimed to take bubble baths with roses, mused openly about carrying a handgun in church, that no other mayor was equally likely to spend his evenings out with old police friends, known felons, amused celebrities, homeless subway riders, that no other mayor left so much uncertainty about where he slept, what he ate, whether he really just said what he said, whose side he was on.” Fair enough. Fine enough. Probably not as urgent a subject for page one as the government shutdown, since he's still going to be rattling around Gracie Mansion till the end of the year, but we've been all around the front page news except for one spot, because that one spot is filled up with something completely worthless. 

At the top of the page, two columns wide, in the lead spot, is a NEWS ANALYSIS piece by Peter Baker, “Reprisals Go Around, And May Come Around / Trump Precedent Could Haunt His Allies.” With the federal government about to shut down, the Times decided that what belongs in the most prominent position in today's paper is a piece of bizarre and vapid speculation about how now that President Trump has flagrantly abused his position and his powers to attack his enemy in what Baker calls a “campaign to imprison, fire, or otherwise punish his political foes and use government power to crack down on free speech he does not like,” there is the danger that some future democratic administration might carry out those same kinds of abuses in return. 

This is how Peter Baker decided to respond to the spectacle of the complete collapse of the rule of law by somehow simultaneously assuming the posture of a kindergarten teacher and of a child sucking its thumb on a sleepy mat. Boy, those Republicans sure wouldn't like it if someone treated them the way that they're treating their opponents right now. Yeah, right. That's why they're trying to fix it so that political power never changes hands again. That's the heart of their entire approach. What even is the use of exploring the dumb hypothetical that the Democrats might prove equally lawless in the future? The real question that demands NEWS ANALYSIS right now is whether if the Democrats do manage to take power again, they will shed their own chronic inhibitions and ignore the hand-wringing of people like Baker, and take swift and decisive action not to emulate crimes of the Trump administration but to punish those crimes decisively, abandoning the presumption going all the way back to Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, if not to the violent unwinding of Reconstruction after the Civil War, that the proper way to deal with lawlessness corruption and misrule is to grant the wrongdoers impunity so as not to stir up a fuss and provoke future bad behavior. 

The way to prevent future presidents from behaving like Donald Trump is not to go back to the Biden administration's paralyzing performance of scrupulous passivity in response to insurrection and other crimes, but for the people who are currently running the country this way to end up disgraced and imprisoned. 

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 along if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.