Good morning. It is November 1st, a new month, election month, and a gray muggy morning in New York City with a hot, dry, scouring wind in the forecast and wildfire warnings in effect, and this is your Indignity Morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The dry conditions made the back page of the front section of this morning's New York Times, “Wildfires burn as drought conditions turn northeast into a tinderbox.” The northeastern tinderbox is not exactly as wildly inflammable as the western versions, but the Times reports that “in New Jersey, 377 wildfires have burned over 628 acres since September 15th, a jump from 26 wildfires with only about seven acres consumed over the same period last year. Connecticut,” the Times reports, has had 84 wildfires since October 21st, an increase from five over the same period in 2023. The largest fire this fall, a 127 acre blaze about 15 miles south of Hartford injured six people and killed one firefighter.” It's all part of the new boom and bust cycle of rain. Later on, the story notes that Asheville, North Carolina has been in a dry spell ever since it was inundated by Hurricane Helene.

On the front of the paper, the lead news column is, “Stealth donors fuel hidden aims late in the race. Money hard to trace. Millions to third party bids for luring votes from Harris or Trump.” It opens by describing a flyer sent to Republicans in North Carolina, urging them to vote for Randall Terry for president, in the name of anti-abortion restrictions. A message whose funding actually tracks back to a Democratic-supported political action committee trying to pry votes away from Donald Trump to benefit Kamala Harris. It's true that this is an all-out brawl for the future of democratic governance itself, but Randall Terry is a genuine terrorist and promoting his brand of extremism. Even with the aim of diluting the political influence of people who think like him, seems like a grotesquely bad idea. Anyway, the point of the article is that the deregulation of campaign funding has made it possible for less oafish operatives than the ones who did the Randall Terry flyer to effectively cover up their involvement in politics. Pacs are required to disclose their donors, but nothing requires those donors, if they themselves are structured as nonprofits, from concealing the sources of the money that they're passing on. 

A nice deadpan moment after the jump describes an organization promoting Green Party scamster, foreign agent, and de facto Trump surrogate Jill Stein in her third-party bid for president in Wisconsin, which somehow went from having zero dollars on October 16th to having $225,000 two days later. “Badger Values, based in Texas, did not respond to a request for comment, and there is little public information available about it.” Badger Values, based in Texas. 

Next to that story on page one is more of the Times's frantic backfilling of the kind of coverage that it would have deemed too partisan to do through most of election season. “Trump clings to his image as strongman, labeled a fascist and in no rush to deny it.” Peter Baker writes, “when former President Donald J. Trump's longest serving chief of staff said last month that his old boss falls into the general definition of fascist, Mr. Trump let loose with the insults, assailing his one time right hand as a total degenerate, a low life, all caps, and a bad general. cap G on general. What Mr. Trump did not do, at least at first, was actually deny that he was or aspired to be a fascist. Speaking of being in no hurry, here's the Times asking on the front page about Trump's response to comments that the Times itself stuffed inside the paper. “Mr. Trump, Baker writes, does not use the word to describe himself. In fact, he uses it to describe his adversaries, but he does not shrink from the impression it leaves. He goes out of his way to portray himself as an American strongman, vowing, if re-elected, to use the military to crack down on dissent, to use the Justice Department to prosecute and imprison his foes, to shut down news media outlets that displease him, to claim authority that his predecessors did not have, and to round up millions of people living in the country illegally, and put them in camps or deport them en masse.” That is all accurate and extremely germane, and it was all available to put into a page one story, on day one, as soon as Kelly came forward. Instead, the Times and the rest of the press, following its lead, let Kelly's remarks bubble along until Kamala Harris began quoting Kelly, at which point there were news cycles to be had, about whether it was appropriate for Harris to call Trump a fascist, and whether it was a tactically sound move, turning a nonpartisan story about the fundamental stakes of the election into one more bit of messaging back and forth between candidates jockeying for position. 

Again, for easy contrast purposes, the left-hand news column on page one is, Anemona Hartocollis tipping her bucket once again in the well that the Times is committed to drilling. “Emails reveal October 7th debates inside Harvard. GOP faults colleges over anti-Semitism.” There's nothing especially new or shocking to be had from the report, but the question of whether elite university administrators were too soft on pro-Palestinian protesters is something that the Times believed and continues to believe deserved intense ongoing public scrutiny day after day, week after week, in prosecutorial mode while the Republican presidential candidate’s expressed desire to be an authoritarian ruler was a background topic behind vibes and polling. 

Likewise, inside the paper, page A12 brings “Medicaid looms large in these voters' lives, but not in campaign.” Here's something crucially important to millions of Americans on which there's a serious contradiction between the policies Donald Trump tried to pursue when he was president and his rhetoric on the campaign trail now. So best to give it a handsome-looking two-page spread on page A12 and A13, with four days left in the campaign. 

Likewise, the bottom half of page A10 is “How second Trump term may recast public health. The COVID pandemic,” the single greatest failure of the Trump administration, gets mentioned in the lead as a device to open the discussion of public health and then sort of slides aside in favor of a discussion of how a Trump administration would be expected to trash public health in general. It is genuinely wild that at no point in either debate or in any interview I've seen has anybody simply asked Donald Trump what he would do as president if he were again to receive word that a deadly pandemic was breaking out somewhere. What could be a more directly pertinent question about the wisdom of returning him to office than that, given that not only did he botch the pandemic in a way that plunged the country into social and economic disaster and led to a million deaths, but his political movement has organized itself now in violent opposition to the parts of his response that were effective. But the Biden-Harris administration doesn't like talking about the pandemic either, and since all politics coverage is messaging rather than substance, nobody bothers to ask. 

Above the public health story is a well-done piece with bizarre timing and placement. The headline is “Late abortions are rare, but they still dominate the debate in politics.” The piece does better than the headline in pointing out that the defining feature of that debate is how completely uninformed it is, as demagogic politicians like Trump and JD Vance attack Democrats with the specter of healthy full-term infants being killed in the womb, the CDC lumps together anything after 21 weeks as a late abortion, mashing together elective pre-viability abortions with life or death interventions near the end of the term, creating an opportunity for shameless demagoguery and the cruelest possible regulations on healthcare.

And atop the hasty pile of efforts to cover the stakes of the election at the last minute, the front of the national section is “Voters will set the course for a federal court system at a crossroads.” A strangely bland look at the divided federal judiciary. The Times decided to address this with an analysis of data collected by Stanford University, leading the Times to report that Joe Biden's judges “on average were somewhat more liberal than those nominated by his Democratic predecessors. Mr. Trump's judges were, on average, ideologically similar to those nominated by previous Republican presidents.” That's bad analysis on its own terms. The actual histogram accompanying the piece shows the modal Trump judge occupying a huge spike toward the extreme right, an unprecedented cohort of judges much further right than the Democratic picks are to the left but whose weight in the overall pool of Trump judges is offset by a somewhat thicker tail stretching out to the center and even leftwards. Moreover, the story goes on to say, “the score does not account for the judges' actual rulings. Those are harder to track ideologically because very few cases in the lower courts have a direct impact on political questions.” Only later down does the story touch on the fact that that assertion is just not true and that the defining feature of the Trump judges especially in their easily shoppable single-judge districts on the Fifth Circuit, is their eagerness to issue sweeping rulings, blocking executive power, and overturning judicial precedent to give the far-right essentially unlimited ability to interfere in the lives of the entire country. But when the dust settles after Election Day, the Times has something it can point to if it's accused of ignoring the real stakes of the election. 

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 is sustained by the contributions of you, the listeners, through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your use of the tip button. 

Breathe deeply, get some rest. It's almost time to stop anticipating the terrible thing and to learn what the terrible thing is going to be. But as we wait, if all goes well, we'll talk again on Monday.