Good morning. It is March 24th. It's a soggy 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. 

The president of the United States went on social media to pump his meme coin last night. Donald Trump posted, “I love dollar Trump” or however you pronounce dollar sign plus Trump. “So cool. The greatest of them all” many exclamation points triggering a 12 % jump in the volatile and inherently worthless tokens price that then settled back to a 9 % gain. A Google news search doesn't seem to turn up any coverage of this particular piece of presidential behavior outside the crypto publications, even though it represents an entirely unprecedented public attempt at self-enrichment.

If the far right edge of the Supreme Court is ever going to get around to overturning New York Times v. Sullivan, they won't be doing it on Steve Wynn's behalf. This morning, with no dissents, the court refused to hear the gambling magnates appeal of the dismissal of a defamation suit he had filed against the Associated Press, a case in which his only path to victory would have been undoing the settled law of Sullivan.

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead story is “V.A. WORKERS SEE CHAOS IN SERVICES FOR MENTAL CARE / TRUMP’S FAST CHANGES / A Fear of Little Privacy, Fewer Therapists and More Frustrations.” It opens with the story of a psychiatrist who was required under a new return to office policy to conduct virtual psychotherapy with her patients from one of 13 cubicles in a large open office space, the kind of setup used for call centers. “Other staff might overhear the sessions or appear on the patient's screen as they passed on their way to the bathroom and break room. The psychiatrist,” the Times continues, “was stunned. Her patients suffered from disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Treating them from her home office, she had needed many months to earn their trust. This new arrangement, she said, violated a core ethical tenet of mental health care, the guarantee of privacy.” Really, the striking word in this account of unfolding disaster is the word “fast” in the headline. The story describes this scene with the worker ordered to do open-air psychotherapy taking place late in February. I'm not even sure if March 24th counts as late in March. So we're looking at a month ago, which was in turn a month after the inauguration. And this kind of instant senseless destruction of the basic functions behind government services is being done fractally across the entirety of the government.

In the next column over from that is a story that in a world where stories could be given proportionate coverage would rate the entire front page. “Trump Decree Is a Warning To Law Firms / Tries to Curb Litigation Against Government.” 

“President Trump, the Times writes, broadened his campaign of retaliation against lawyers he dislikes with a new memorandum that threatens to use government power to punish any law firms that in his view, unfairly challenge his administration. The memorandum directs the heads of the justice and homeland security departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States or in matters that come before federal agencies. Mr. Trump,” the story continues, “issued the order late Friday night after a tumultuous week for the American legal community in which one of the country's premier firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, struck a deal with the White House to spare the company from a punitive decree recently issued by Mr. Trump.” There isn't really any way of glossing that as anything short of the president completely rejecting the rule of law. Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear what he considers to be frivolous, unreasonable, or vexatious litigation. It includes efforts to hold him liable for sexual abuse, fraud, and insurrection.

There is no challenge to his personal or official misconduct that he doesn't view as illegitimate. And he intends to use the executive branch as his personal litigation shop and private investigation firm. Paul, Weiss thought that if they cut a deal and put their heads down, they could shuffle on into a survivable future with a healthier working relationship with the Trump administration. Now here is that future, and it's one in which there is no possible working relationship between someone who practices law and the President. The law and this presidency are mutually exclusive. 

The rest of the top of page one is taken up by a four-column photo of the Pope seated in a wheelchair on a balcony, his lower parts pixelated by the textured balcony glass, as he raises a hand not very far to wave to the crowd outside his hospital before being discharged. The story inside the paper reports that Pope Francis emerged “deeply changed and diminished looking, underlining what will be a long recovery and a new phase for him in the church. It became apparent on the balcony that for now, the Francis of old, who spoke off the cuff and made physical closeness to the faithful, a hallmark of his pontificate was transformed.” The story says he's supposed to convalesce in his papal residence for the next two months.

Below the Pope photo on the center of page one, “Migrants Sent Into Panama Are Stranded.” The Times continues following the migrant population first caught up with while they were incarcerated in a Panama City hotel. Then they were sent to a concentration camp in the jungle. And finally, the Times writes, “after a lawsuit and an outcry from human rights groups, the Panamanian authorities released the deportees, busing them back to Panama City. Now, the remaining migrants — from Iran, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan and elsewhere — are free but stranded
in a country that doesn’t want them, many sleeping in a school gymnasium made available by an aid group, with no real sense of what to do next.”

Down in the bottom right hand corner of the page, Max Frankel gets a Robert D. McFadden obituary. “Max Frankel,” it says, “who fled Nazi Germany as a boy and rose to pinnacles of American journalism as a Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent for the New York Times and later, as its executive editor, during eight years of changing fortunes and technology, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 94.” Those years of service, including covering Nixon's trip to China, won him not quite a full two page spread inside the paper, following his life from Galicia in the 1930s to a columnist slot with the New York Times Magazine, ending in 2000. He also gets a couple of photo credits for pictures he snapped while covering Moscow at the end of the 1950s. After his firsthand experience with totalitarian states, he took over the executive editorship from Am Rosenthal. “Starting off,” the obituary says, “with a surge of changes to diffuse authority and relaxed tensions, he named new editors to news desks and gave them authority to pick deputies, make major assignments and grant raises and promotions. All prerogatives Mr. Rosenthal had retained. While he controlled page one, Mr. Frankel invited collegial discussions about the content and display of its articles and pictures, and he encouraged support nets to make many news decisions without his oversight. Mr. Frankel,” the story goes on to say, “hired and promoted more black and Hispanic staff members, but acknowledged that racial diversification was fitful and slow. Women fared better. There were none on the masthead of news executives or even in line to lead major departments in 1986 but during his tenure, women were hired in equal numbers with men and filled more than a third of the professional jobs.” Again, this is 1986, a solid two decades after the peak of the civil rights movement. The story continues. “He demurred from same sex marriage announcements, but lifted a ban on the term gay and assigned a gay reporter, Jeffrey Schmaltz, to write about gay politics and AIDS, from which he died at 39. The Times also began citing AIDS and obituaries as a cause of death, and in another bout of popular usage, began listing companions as survivors of the deceased.” Also on page one, there are stories about British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and about artificial intelligence, which are to me more or less the same subject. 

And inside the paper on page A11, there's a harnessed pair of stories about the question of whether we're ever going to see an end to gerontocracy. On the left, “Retirement talk hovers over Pelosi and her city. Challengers from the left and right line up.” 

“Nancy Pelosi,” it says, “has filed a statement of candidacy for 2026, a formality that allows her to raise money, but has not explicitly said she will run or that she will not. Even her closest allies do not know her plans.” 

Next to that and half a century further along the timeline, “As the left ponders a future after Sanders, it waits for Ocasio-Cortez to make a decision.” This looks like the Times' third piece related to the Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fighting oligarchy tour, but the first to mention the tour's name. And as they draw tens of thousands of people around the West, including in Denver, a crowd of 34,000, what Sanders aides, the Times writes, “said was the largest crowd of his career, the Times insists on packaging its coverage around the question of what this means for their individual political personae. “In the previous story,” the Times wrote, “an interview with the New York Times this week, Mr. Sanders, who mentioned Miss Ocasio-Cortez's name just once in his 42 minute speech on Thursday, declined to entertain discussion about whether inviting her on tour with him represented a passing of the torch. ‘That's inside the beltway gossip,’ he grumbled. ‘You got any better questions?’” 

The answer is; no. Today's paper writes “neither has so much as obliquely referred to the torch passing nature of their trip and in an interview Mr. Sanders declined to answer questions about whether miss Ocasio-Cortez, 35, would inherit his mantle. But the subtext of their travels appears clear.” Does it now? Seems like what's really clear is that writing about the text of the tour? The thing that five digit crowds are turning out for would be inimical to the New York Times' theories of what matters in politics. 

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 can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.