Good morning. It is October 27th. It's a clear morning in New York City, yet another exemplary October day. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Hurricane Melissa is closing in on Jamaica as an apocalyptically strong category five storm. The Associated Press writes that “forecasters said it would unleash catastrophic flooding, landslides and widespread damage. It would be the strongest hurricane to hit the island since record keeping began in 1851.” The AP reports that the storm has already killed six people in the Caribbean and that its storm surge could be 12 feet. Its maximum sustained winds now are 165 miles an hour. Some areas in Eastern Jamaica, the AP writes, could see up to 40 inches of rain.

More than 164,000 people showed up for early voting in New York City over the weekend. That was a record turnout. amNewYork reports that it was more than quadruple the turnout of 2021, which was 31,176 through the first two days. 

President Donald Trump is on a tour of Asia on the way there, talking to reporters on the plane. He held forth about how representatives Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are “low IQ” and said he expected that they would have done very badly on the tests he said he chose to take at Walter Reed Hospital recently, which he said started easy and then got very difficult. Given what the president cited as examples from the test, which was him tossing off names of animals, it sounded as if he was recounting having taken and struggled with, not an aptitude test, as he described it to reporters, but a screening exam for dementia. The president also said that he had undergone an MRI during the exam. 

The presidential trip takes up the lead spot on the front of this morning's New York Times with a two-column headline, “Chinese and U.S. Officials
Closing In on a Trade Deal,” covering a news story on the right, “Talks on Tariffs and Minerals Before Xi and Trump Meet,” and on the left, “NEWS ANALYSIS / A Tug of War Catches Asia in the Middle.” 

That lead news story begins. Chinese and American trade negotiators said on Sunday that they had agreed to a framework of a deal on tariffs and other issues ahead of an expected meeting of the country's top leaders this week. ‘We're moving forward to the final details of the type of agreement that the leaders can review and decide if they want to conclude together.’ Jamieson Greer, the United States trade representative, said to reporters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital. “He also said the two sides had also discussed”—
more really great front page copy editing there—“had also discussed another extension in a series of truces on tariffs they have engaged in this year. China's top trade negotiator, Li Chenggang, described the talks between the United States and China as candid and in-depth discussions on the trade deal, adding that the two sides had reached a ‘preliminary consensus.’” 

The accompanying NEWS ANALYSIS story is sort of a soup, because it's trying to analyze an extremely soupy reality. “President Trump,” the Times writes, “touched down in Malaysia on Sunday, beginning an Asian tour that will bring him face to face with China's top leader, Xi Jinping, as well as a region that has been increasingly reshaped by the competition between Beijing and Washington. In this new kind of superpower rivalry, he and Mr. Xi are offering contrasting visions for how the world should be ordered, with consequences for chip factories in South Korea, factory floors in Vietnam, the contested waters of the South China Sea and the status of the self-governed island of Taiwan.” The trouble here is that Trump's vision contrasts with Xi's vision in that one vision is incoherent and the other vision is more coherent. The story quotes a political science expert as saying that other countries in Asia want to be able to play China and the United States off against each other, that the Times writes “might have been easier in the past when the United States was more engaged with Asia. When an American president visited, it would often be a way to reassure the United States' friends in the region that Washington had their backs when it came to an increasingly assertive China. But today, America's commitments to its allies and partners remain an open question, strained by resentment over tariffs and uncertainty over the future of U.S. deployments. Beijing,” the Times writes, “has sought to take advantage of that uncertainty by offering trade deals and investments to its neighbors while staking a wider claim to the region as the only superpower willing and able to confront the Trump administration.” 

Inside the paper on page A9, facing the jump of that piece, the Times offers another NEWS ANALYSIS piece devoted to the non-analytic presidency. “Nine months into his term,” this one says, “President Trump's approach to allies, adversaries, and competitors around the world has proved a strange mix of successes and increasingly frequent and erratic eruptions, whether he is dealing with Canada or China, Venezuela or the Middle East, or the war for control of Ukraine.” The piece then credits him with success for forcing European allies to pick up more of their defense spending, whether that's really a success probably depends in the medium term on whether Russia takes advantage of the United States' less strenuous commitment to European defense. And the story says “he has intervened to help diffuse a number of long-running regional conflicts, even if some of his claimed successes prove temporary.” And then it cites the Gaza ceasefire, which it says “required forceful and skillful handling of his reluctant Israeli counterpart.” But, the Times then writes, “if anyone expected Mr. Trump to grow into the kind of global statesman that most of his predecessors sought to be remembered as, they have been sorely disappointed. Never known for consistency or niceties, Mr. Trump has only grown more capricious in his conduct of foreign policy, a tendency on full display as he begins a swing through Asia to confront a combative China and allies uncertain of what he wants or how to deal with him.” And then there's a roundup of his erratic behavior, which includes the Times writing, “not long after a fruitful meeting with Canada's prime minister, Mark Carney, Mr. Trump shut down trade talks in a pique on Friday because he did not like a Canadian television advertisement that featured the true voice of President Ronald Reagan from a 38 year old radio speech warning of the long term costs of tariffs. On Saturday, he went further, slapping additional 10 percent tariffs on Canadian goods, a move that could cost American consumers billions simply because Mr. Trump was unhappy with the ad which was created by the Ontario government.” 

In other news about how the Trump administration's laser focus plays out in foreign affairs, the bottom of page A11 has a headline that is for once much more focused and incisive than the piece itself manages to be. “Maduro is using crypto to fight U.S. sanctions” is the headline. Then you sort of have to rummage around inside the story, pass the lead about the pressure that American sanctions are putting on the Venezuelan economy, to reach the 11th and 12th paragraphs, where the Times writes, “Shortly after President Trump won re-election, Venezuela's government authorized the country's first cryptocurrency exchanges, paving the way for a broader shift toward financial assets that are outside the scope of traditional sanctions enforcement. Venezuela today sells the bulk of its oil to China, gets paid in crypto, and then funnels some of those revenues back into the national economy through the designated crypto exchanges. These moves have, in a matter of months, turned Venezuela into arguably the first nation to manage a large share of its public finances in crypto.” And one of the main platforms on which they are doing this is Binance, whose founder, you may recall, was pardoned by Trump last week on his money laundering conviction in an apparent reward for the company's extensive investment in and promotion of the president's family's personal cryptocurrency project. 

Back on page one, the rest of the top of the page is a four column photo of a slightly out of focus fifth generation Iowa farmer with a sprouting field stretching off behind him toward the horizon. The headline below says “In Trump-Friendly Iowa, His Policies Have Hurt / Moves on Immigration, Trade and Energy Squeeze Farms.” Dateline “Des Moines — When President Trump announced the $20 billion bailout for Argentina this month, Larry Ory, 86, a farmer in Earlham, Iowa, could hardly believe it, especially after boatloads of Argentine soybeans began shipping to China, a once critical customer for Mr. Ory's family. For Iowans, losing China's soybean market in the president's trade war was only one of many economic shocks that have hit the state since the start of Mr. Trump's second term. The cost of tractors and fertilizers have shot up with his tariffs.”—That should be either “costs” or “has”—“Labor has grown scarcer in agribusinesses. Major manufacturers have laid off workers. Even the ubiquitous wind turbines that provide income for some Iowa farmers are in the president's sights.” The story goes on to say, “since siding with Barack Obama twice, Iowa has become a stronghold for Mr. Trump. Yet perhaps no state has struggled more with his economic policies. During the first quarter of 2025, Iowa's gross domestic product dropped by 6.1 percent, more than any other state aside from neighboring Nebraska.” 

Facing the jump of that story, down on the lower part of page A15, The Times is covering another piece of the administration's agriculture and food policies, namely that we're five days away from the termination of 42 million people's access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

“With no end in sight to the nearly month-long federal government shutdown,” the Times writes, “funding for the nation's largest food assistance program, known as SNAP, will disappear at the start of November, according to the Department of Agriculture. On Friday, the Trump administration said in a memo that it would not tap into contingency funds to keep payments flowing to states.” The last part of that paragraph and the first part of that paragraph are sitting in pretty glaring tension with each other. Despite the Times's use of the evasive news writers “with,” it's true that the government shutdown is ongoing, but it is not true that it in any way necessitates cutting 42 million people off from their ability to buy food at the end of this week. The Trump administration is choosing not to spend the money to keep the assistance going. That means, as the story reports, that people are going to turn to food banks or try to turn to food banks. “But,” the Times writes, “earlier this year, the Trump administration cut nearly $1 billion in federal aid for anti-hunger programs, including one that supplies food directly to food banks.” The story goes on to say “several food bank directors who were interviewed cited the same statistic. For every nine meals that were supplied by federal food assistance, food pantries can provide only one of their own. No matter how thin they stretch their resources, they will not be able to fill the gap if funding for SNAP does not come through.” 

And, back on page one of the paper, the last headline above the fold is, “Arrests Made In Jewel Heist At the Louvre.” The news break is not as much of a moment of redemption for the French crime fighting system as they might have hoped. “The police,” the Times writes, “have made arrests in the brazen jewelry heist at the Louvre Museum in Paris, the French authorities said on Sunday, without specifying how many people had been taken into custody. The robbery, which stunned France, was carried out by four people on October 19. Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said in a statement that the arrests were made on Saturday evening and that one man was taken into custody today at the Charles de Gaulle airport as he was trying to leave the country. It was not immediately clear whether the police had recovered any of the stolen jewelry, which is worth more than 100 million dollars and includes gem studded royal tiaras, necklaces and earrings dating to the 19th century. The arrests,” the Times writes, “were a major breakthrough for French investigators who are racing to find the thieves before the jewelry is dismantled and the rare stones and metals can be sold or melted down, as many experts fear they will be.” But, a little while later, the story says “the arrests were first reported by French news media citing anonymous sources, apparently catching the authorities by surprise. ‘I deeply regret the hasty disclosure of this information,’ Ms. Beccuau said in her statement. She said that the leaked information would hinder the 100 or so investigators who mobilized in the search for both the stolen jewelry and for all the criminals.”

And on page A12, the whole front of the national section is taken up by the story, “Heat Virtually Wipes Out Two Key Coral Species Off Florida. Crisis Threatens Reef's Ability to Support Marine Life and Protect Coasts. After a searing ocean heat wave in 2023, two of the most historically important coral species in Florida are functionally extinct from the state's reef, scientists have found. Elkhorn and Staghorn coral, known for their branching limestone arms that create incomparable reef habitat, have all but vanished everywhere except the northernmost sections of the reef, according to research published on Thursday in the journal Science. ‘Those that remain are so diminished that they are not able to contribute to the ecosystem in a meaningful way,’ the authors said.” And then the Times delivers a canonical quote in the global warming science genre. “‘Scientists have been warning of this for quite literally decades,’ said Andrew Baker a professor of marine biology at the University of Miami and one of the authors of the study. ‘The surprise is that it happened so fast and it wasn't more deaths by a thousand cuts It was a sudden final kind of guillotine.’” Swap out the nouns and that's almost certainly what you're gonna get from a glacier scientist When the next big ice shelf collapses. 

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 Max Scocca-Ho. The sunset has crept before six o'clock, so don't procrastinate on getting out to see some daylight. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.