Good morning. It is May 14th. It is pouring rain 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. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, four columns wide, is a picture of a greeting between the lawless strongman leader of a corrupt Petro-state and Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, as the latter stretches out his hands to welcome Donald Trump. 

In the lead news spot, two columns wide, is a NEWS ANALYSIS piece in which the force field of abstractions that the Times relies on to prevent unpleasant truths from directly touching its pages is trembling and glitching under the strain of reality. “Emboldened President Jumps Ethical Barriers” is the headline, “Qatari Jet Deepens Corruption Concerns.” That last trembling “concerns.” Is there desperately trying to keep this a matter of discourse about corruption? A political topic for political figures to deal with, while the press sits back objectively and describes their efforts to deal with it, rather than just plain material corruption carried out in full view of the press.

“During President Trump's first term,” the piece begins, “the idea that special interests and governments were buying meals and booking rooms at his hotels set off legal and ethical alarms about the potential for corruption. Mr. Trump's second term is making those concerns look trivial.” Or you could just say, during President Trump's first term, special interests and governments bought meals and booked rooms at his hotels. Mr. Trump's second term is making those dealings look trivial. See?

You don't even need to call him corrupt, which violates the New York Times's standards of manners, but you can just say what the facts are. The story continues. “The administration's plan to accept a $400 million luxury jet from the Qatari royal family is only the latest example of an increasingly no holds barred atmosphere in Washington under Trump 2.0. Not only would the famously transactional chief executive be able to use the plane while in office, but he is also expected to transfer it to his presidential foundation once he leaves the White House.” There. Seeing “no-holds-barred atmosphere in Washington” is still a bit of a diffusion away from Trump, but the focus is basically on the substance of the news, and there are no hypothetical critics to get in the way. “The second Trump administration,” the story continues, “is showing striking disdain for one-time norms of propriety and for traditional legal and political guardrails around public service.” That's almost there. Just stop saying “legal guardrails” when what you mean is laws. But from there, the story starts pretty much cooking. “It is clearly emboldened,” the story says, “in part because of the Supreme Court's ruling last year that granted immunity to presidents for their official actions and because of the political reality that Mr. Trump's hold on the Republican Party means he need not fear impeachment.”

That's right. That's just how it is. And you didn't even need to drag in a Democrat to present the straightforward and accurate proposition that the Republicans are not going to impeach the president no matter what he does. “Mr. Trump's inaugural committee raked in $239 million,” the piece says, “from wealthy business interests, hoping to curry his favor or at least avoid his wrath.” Again, completely accurate and straightforward description of the dynamic of bribery and extortion in which the president operates, “more than doubling the previous record, 107 million, set by his inaugural committee in 2017. There is no way to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on dinners and events, and the committee has not said what will happen to leftover funds.” There it is, facts in the newspaper. The president's inaugural funding as a matter of simply observable fact could not have been and was not spent on his inauguration. The facts, courtesy of reporter Charlie Savage, just keep on coming. The story talks about the dollar sign Trump meme coin and the contest offering access to the president for people who buy it. “The contest,” Savage writes, “injected new interest in the coin, even though it has no intrinsic value.” Then just before it reaches the jump, the story says “the removal of such constraints extends to law enforcement” and goes into how Trump has shut down the enforcement of laws against cryptocurrency scamming and against foreign corruption. And it says “Attorney General Pam Bondi herself, a former highly paid lobbyist for Qatar, narrowed enforcement of a law requiring lobbyists for foreign governments to register such relationships and disclose what they are paid.” Then comes a little bit of “to be sure,” starting with the pre-Trump Supreme Court's unanimous decision to make bribery laws all but unenforceable, and then in a mandatory gesture at non-partisanship, bringing in Senator Robert Menendez's bribe-taking, and Hunter Biden's fake job in the Ukrainian energy industry. “But” the story says, “the current moment, coming as Mr. Trump’s crypto gambit merges into his intended acquisition of a Qatari plane, is particularly remarkable for the openness with which the president, his immediate family and entities in his orbit are unabashedly leveraging his position to accrue personal benefits or to otherwise advance his personal agenda separate from governmental policymaking.” 

And there's more about real estate dealings and his shakedowns of media companies, and circling back to the plane, on the subject of which the Times breaks with the normal standard of deference under which reporters impute the most respectable interpretation available and sometimes interpretations so respectable that they're not plausibly available to the president's words and actions. Here the Times writes, “on Monday, Mr. Trump also signaled that he viewed Qatar's offer of a plane as something of a quid pro quo, emphasizing that the United States had provided security to the Gulf country and we will continue to. He added that he considered the gift a very nice gesture from the Qataris. ‘Only a stupid person,’ he said, ‘would turn down a free, very expensive airplane.’”

Right below that, on the jump on page A13, is an update on the Trump pump and dump crypto coin. “Some savvy traders in Trump's contest sold all their digital coins, but still won. As the unusual contest came to a close on Monday,” the Times writes, “at least 17 of the 220 winning bidders had figured out a way to effectively outsmart the sponsors of the contest.” It's not really clear that The sponsors of the contest were who they were outsmarting. As the story goes on to explain, “these crypto investors had secured an invitation to the dinner even though their online wallets showed that they held zero of the meme coins, a type of novelty digital currency often based on a joke or mascot.” Or in this case, both. “That is because,” the Times writes “because of a quirk in the rules. The winners were selected based on the average number of coins they held during the three weeks the contest was underway rather than their total at the end of bidding. Participants expected the price of the coin to crash as soon as the contest ended. And it did just that on Monday afternoon, plunging by 6.5 % once the winners were announced. By that point, nearly 20 of the contestants had sold off or transferred all their dollar sign Trump holdings, according to an analysis by the New York Times.” The piece argues that this line of exploitation was not what Trump and his meme coin company wanted, because they wanted the price to stay high. But when the Times goes deeper into the numbers, doesn't seem like it mattered very much to them. “Overall,” the Times writes, “the winners of the contest held $182 million worth of the dollar sign Trump coins at the time the contest closed. They had spent $191 million to buy those coins, meaning that in aggregate, the winners had lost more money on the purchases than they had gained, according to an analysis of public transaction data by the Times. This is consistent with trading data that shows that most buyers of the coin, since it was first introduced in January, have lost money, a total of $3.9 billion. Whether traders make or lose money,” the Times continues, “the Trump family and its partners get a transaction fee each time the coins change hands, earning at least $320 million since $Trump went on sale in January.” And the story explains that after the sharps had finished ripping off the suckers, the meme coin account then began promoting an NFT and some unspecified system of rewards points. “By Monday evening,” the story concludes, “the price of the Dollar Sign Trump coin had inched up once again.” 

Elsewhere on page one, there is Cassandra Cassie Ventura's testimony from the Sean Combs sex crimes case. And next to that, “M.L.B.’s Mercy For Rose Clears Path to the Hall,” on the news that the statutory rapist Pete Rose has benefited after his death from having Donald Trump's support and from the imposed consensus that gambling is fine and that enough people have been punished for sex abuse already by being removed from Major League Baseball's permanently ineligible list. Like many people who choose to do something wrong to propitiate Donald Trump, Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred pretended to be simply acting on a neutral general principle, restoring the standing of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the rest of the Chicago Black Sox and various other people on the grounds that they're dead and a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game. 

Somehow, none of the other baseball commissioners through the decades believed that the deaths of the individual participants in this scheme to throw the World Series meant that their actions did not rate eternal opprobrium, and Pete Rose went to his grave, obfuscating the extent to which he had directly violated the integrity of the game for the sake of his personal gambling interests. But currying favor with Donald Trump is more important than taking any measures to protect the game against the immense future gambling scandal that it is unavoidably brewing up through its gambling partnerships.

And on the left side of the page, the headline is, “OFFICERS SAY GAZA NEARS STARVATION / Israelis Privately Admit to Threat to Civilians.” Citing “three Israeli defense officials familiar with conditions in the enclave,” the Times writes, “For months, Israel has maintained that its blockade on food and fuel to Gaza did not pose a major threat to civilian life in the territory, even as the United Nations and other aid agencies have said a famine was looming.
But Israeli military officers who monitor humanitarian conditions in Gaza have warned their commanders in recent days that unless the blockade is lifted quickly, many areas of the enclave will likely run out of enough food to meet minimum daily nutritional needs, according to the defense officials. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details.” 

The story goes on to say “the growing acknowledgement within part of the Israeli security establishment of a hunger crisis in Gaza comes as Israel has vowed to dramatically expand the war in Gaza to destroy Hamas and bring back the remaining hostages to an aims that more than 19 months of war have yet to achieve.” And yet, the war has managed to bring Gaza to the brink of starvation. Are the goals of a war what you say you're doing, or are the goals of a war what the war accomplishes? 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 Socca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Click those buttons if you're able and please keep them coming. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.