Good morning. It is May 30th. It is an extraordinarily humid 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. 

Donald Trump denounced Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society mastermind and bag man who put together Trump's Supreme Court supermajority for him, calling Leo in a truth social post “a real sleazebag and a bad person who in his own way probably hates America.” Absolutely true observations there. Trump wrote, “He openly brags how he controls judges and even justices of the United States Supreme Court,” adding, “I hope that is not so and don't believe it is.” The stories about the flare up tend to be inscrutable because they stipulate that Trump is angry about the decision by the court of international trade declaring his tariffs illegal, but don't specifically say that Leonard Leo provided financial support to the plaintiff's side in that lawsuit. Instead, it's all just presented as formless Trump rage against a judiciary that includes his own appointments, which he's now blaming on bad advice from the Federalist Society. Ultimately, Leonard Leo's paymasters had wanted to break the regulatory state and the mechanisms of Republican democracy that allow the general public to defend its interests against plutocrats and corporations. And so they built a Supreme Court that was willing to grant the chief executive the powers of the king, as long as that chief executive came from the Republican Party. But now they're belatedly figuring out that the monarch they've created has no real obligation to protect their financial interests. And so from their point of view, they're trying to rein him in. And from his point of view, they're betraying him. 

In other news of Decadent Empire, Bernard Carrick, the New York City police commissioner, turned Interior Minister of the Provisional Government of Iraq, turned convicted felon, turned Donald Trump pardon recipient, died at the age of 69. Carrick managed to distinguish himself as an outstanding scumbag, even by the standards of the Giuliani and George W. Bush administrations in which he moved. His professional and personal conduct were probably best epitomized by the episode in which he appropriated for himself an apartment overlooking the smoldering wreckage of Ground Zero that had been donated for the rest and recovery of the people responding to the carnage and used it to carry on an extramarital affair with the right-wing publisher Judith Regan who put out his autobiography. 

In other more up-to-the-minute news about the depravity of the people who get to run things, The New York Times has a big story this morning online. “On the campaign trail, Elon Musk juggled drugs and family drama. As Mr. Musk entered President Trump's orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous and his drug use was more intense than previously known.” The thrust of the story is not particularly surprising. One of the two reporters on it is Kristin Grind, who came to The Times from being part of the Wall Street Journal team covering Elon Musk's drug problems. And it might have been nice to have this story back when Musk was seizing control of the federal government. But now that he's officially checking out from his day's job, here's the story. And it's a pretty juicy story under the New York Times' stamp of approval.

And when I say juicy, there are actually some fluids involved, apparently. “Mr. Musk's drug consumption,” the Times writes, “went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, and he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall.” According to a photo of the box, and people who have seen it. It is unclear,” the Times continues,” whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi, and garbling his answers in a staged interview. At the same time,” the story continues, “Mr. Musk's family life has grown increasingly tumultuous, as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.” 

The story describes how his friends and intimates have turned on him, with the story sourced to interviews with more than a dozen people who have known or worked with him. The Times writes, “he plays video games for hours on end. He struggles with binge eating, according to people familiar with his habits, and takes weight loss medication. And he posts day and night on his social media platform, X.” The round-the-clock posting, like Musk's erratic public behaviors, was the opposite of a secret, but now the Times is willing to stitch it together with the behind-the-scenes reporting on his alleged drug consumption. 

This morning's print edition of the Times arrived packaged with the perfect New York Times advertising double feature. The whole thing was wrapped in a glossy, heavy stock Bottega Veneta luxury ad so inscrutably stylized that it didn't bother to mention exactly what luxury goods it was trying to sell. And inside that was a loose mailing style envelope from the AARP offering a free grab and go cooler to anyone who signs up for or renews a membership. 

With those out of the way, there was the front page with the top right news spot, two columns wide, reading “Rulings on Tariffs Clash, Clouding Trade Outlook / Trump’s Tough Import Taxes Win Reprieve, but Their Future Is Uncertain.” The story begins, “A head-spinning series of court rulings over President Trump's signature tariffs left Washington, Wall Street, and much of the world trying to discern the future of US trade policy on Thursday, including whether import taxes would fall meaningfully or if the administration would get the legal green light to upend the global trading system.
Less than 24 hours after the US Court of International Trade blocked steep tariffs that Mr. Trump had imposed on trading partners using emergency powers, a separate court temporarily paused that decision, sowing even more chaos on a day filled with economic uncertainty.” 

Here, the Times' effort to sound omnisciently authoritative just muddies things up. The head-spinning series of court rulings was just two court rulings, one on Wednesday, one on Thursday, and the Times also indulges in its constant baffling habit, for a supposed paper of record, of failing to specify basic information about what happened. In this case, which court issued yesterday's ruling. It was the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That fact on its own doesn't really tell me anything, and I have not taken the time to Google the 11 judges on the panel to see who appointed each of them. But with basic questions like whether the president has the authority to unilaterally annihilate the economy, being contested up and down the federal court system, it seems like a basic journalistic obligation to keep the readers informed of which courts are doing what. What's the benefit of the readers to referring to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as “an unspecified separate court when you could just stick the name in there?”

“Less than 24 hours after the US Court of International Trade blocked steep tariffs that Mr. Trump had imposed on trading partners using emergency powers, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit temporarily paused that decision. Sowing even more chaos, blah, blah.” Who, what, where, when, why is a court a who, or what? Either way, inform your readers. 

Next to that is a big photo with a big feature from the heart of Trump territory. “‘Everyone Knows Carol’: In Missouri, Immigrant’s Arrest Stuns a Deep-Red Town.” It's about how a beloved local waitress in Kennet, Missouri, mother of three American citizen children who'd been in the country for 20 years, is now in federal immigration detention. The Times reports on how the people in the town are responding to the disappearance of the familiar face of Ming-Li Hui, known as Carol. The Times writes, “‘I voted for Donald Trump and so did practically everyone here,’ said Vanessa Cowart, a friend of Ms. Way from church. ‘But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.’” Yes, ma'am. We all remember those pre-printed signs being waved by the crowd at the Republican National Convention reading MASS DEPORTATION NOW, BUT NOT OF MOMS. The story continues. “Adam Squires, a onetime candidate for mayor of Kennett, saw it differently. He did not bear any ill will for Ms. Hui, he said, but he voted for Mr. Trump, as did 80 percent of voters in Dunklin County, and he was glad to see the deportation campaign reach home. ‘They vote for Trump, and then they get mad because the stuff starts happening,’ he said of his neighbors. ‘We’ve got to get rid of all the illegals. This is just a start.’”

Inside the paper on page A16, The Times reports that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as part of the anti-vaccine commitment that he carried with him to his office, killed off a nearly $600 million contract to the drug maker Moderna that was intended to develop a shot for humans against Bird flu. This is part of the effort specifically to capitalize on anti-COVID vaccine sentiment to bring a halt to the near miraculous breakthroughs achieved by mRNA vaccine technology. “Andrew Nixon, a Health and Human Services spokesman said, ‘after a rigorous review, we concluded that continued investment in Moderna's H5N1 mRNA vaccine was not scientifically or ethically justifiable.’” Further down in the story, in the second column, there's a one paragraph reference to a story that gets a fuller treatment on page A8, where the headline is, “Canada wants to kill 400 ostriches exposed to avian flu. Kennedy wants to save them.” Driven by his subliterate vulgar Darwinian unto eugenicist belief system, Kennedy, in concert with Mehmet Oz, the Trump administration's head of Medicare and Medicaid, wants to import a diseased flock of birds to the United States and turn them loose on a ranch owned by Dr. Oz in Florida.

There, the consortium of cranks and quacks believes there will be an opportunity to study the birds that survive the virus. There will also, evolutionary fitness being evolutionary fitness, be a chance for all of us to learn about the virus that survives the birds. 

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 with your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Please do keep on sending those in. Enjoy your weekend after Memorial Day, which is still somehow halfway in May. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.