Good morning. It is May 21st. It is dark and chilly and wet 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 Trump administration appears to have sent a plane carrying detained migrants to the violent and unstable nation of South Sudan, which looks like a direct violation of a judge's order barring such removals, a Justice Department lawyer reportedly told the judge, that of the two known prisoners who were reportedly being sent to South Sudan, one of them, originally from Myanmar, was being returned to Myanmar. But the lawyer, the New York Times writes, “declined to say where the second migrant, a Vietnamese man, was deported, saying it was classified information. It was unclear how many other migrants might be on that deportation flight. The judge, District Court Judge Brian E. Murphy in Boston asked under what authority that information would be classified,” and, the Times writes, after a second break, Joseph N. Mazzara, the Homeland Security Department's acting general counsel, said that he was not sure whether the information was classified, but that he did not know the plane's current location in any event. The judge,” the Times writes, “warned officials involved in the deportations who were aware of his order, including potentially the pilots of the plane could face criminal sanctions. ‘Based on what I have been told, he said, this seems like it may be contempt.’” 

The House Rules Committee met in the middle of the night last night to push along Donald Trump's preferred spending bill, which would slash Medicaid and food assistance and extend the tax cuts of the first Trump administration. House Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to discipline both the handful of Republicans who don't want poor people in their states to lose necessary support and the furthest right-wing faction, which is angry that the bill doesn't cut more spending and would therefore increase the deficit. The speaker has a little more room to maneuver than he did before because Democratic representative Jerry Connolly of the 11th district of Virginia died this morning of esophageal cancer at the age of 75. Connolly was the third member of the House Democratic Congress, 70 years of age or older, to have died this year within a few months of reelection, to leave an empty seat in the narrowly divided house. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the flexible formatting continues with the top right space occupied by not merely a headline, not simply a photo, but an inkless white text headline carved out of the space of the photo itself, “How Search for New Air Force One Led Trump to Qatar’s Luxury Jet” is the text, against a mostly blue sky and a few blurry leaves hanging down in the foreground above the bright white 747 itself parked on the ground. It really is astonishingly white, through the miraculous interaction of high quality printing with the interpretive inventiveness of the human eye/brain system the plane looks much much whiter than the gray newsprint page on which it is printed or rather not printed. I Used to work at the New York Observer, I know that you can make something look pure white, even on a salmon colored sheet of newsprint But the plane looks so good that I had to double check with production expert Joe MacLeod to confirm the thing that I absolutely already knew, which is that you can't add white to newsprint. Just the pure power of suggestibility here. And speaking of suggestibility, the Times's reporting serves to re-recast the story of how exactly Donald Trump came to be offered a free airplane. Yes, the plane was a white elephant that Qatar was trying to unload. But what the Times reports is that the United States made the initial approach thanks to Trump's ongoing frustrations with Boeing's very slow moving project to replace the current Air Force One jets with its own new planes. Here, petulant baby though he is, Trump seems to have a point. Whether he really needs a new Air Force One or not, the contract for the new planes was signed in 2018 and the initial delivery date in 2024 has now been pushed back to 2027. Every story about the plane question describes the incredibly sophisticated systems that a presidential jet is supposed to be equipped with for security and maneuverability. But 2018 to 2027 is a longer span of time than it took to design and build the Saturn V rocket and the Apollo module and fly them to the moon. It's taking longer for Boeing to customize two airplanes than it took the allies to prepare and equip the entire Normandy invasion from scratch. And so Donald Trump went looking for another way to get an airplane. The Times writes, “interviews with 14 people involved in or briefed on the search for the replacement plane say it started when the White House military office, which oversees presidential travel, worked with Boeing and the Defense Department to compile a list of every late model 747 on the market with a business jet layout which could more quickly be retrofitted into a presidential plane. There were only eight planes in the world that fit the bill, including a flashy double-decker jet that Qatar had been trying to sell for several years with no luck.” There's a little bit of a puzzling inconsistency here, given that all the stories about what it takes to properly make an airplane into Air Force One dictate that the plane would have to be stripped down to the bones for a complete security inspection and overhaul for performance.

In which case, what the layout and trim package might have been beforehand doesn't really seem relevant. But that's the story. And where the story takes a turn is where the Times is not so much reporting a piece of news as bracketing the place where further reporting would eventually supply that news. The story talks about how Qatar was trying to sell the jet and how its market value is probably between 150 million dollars and 180 million dollars.

But, The Times writes, “it turned out that Qatar would not be selling the plane after all. By the time Mr. Trump toured the aircraft on February 15th,” The Times writes, “discussions about how to acquire the plane had changed. The talk among senior aides to Mr. Trump shifted from a government-to-government sale to a donation. That,” The Times continues, “was a surprise to Air Force officials. At no point, Pentagon officials said, did the Air Force propose that the plane be donated. One senior administration official told the Times that Qatar raised the option of a potential gift, or at least that Qatari officials were agreeable to the idea of a no-charge government-to-government transfer when it came up.” Well, those are two very different propositions, aren't they? Then two other officials supply two more not exactly reconcilable accounts of whether it was Qatar's idea or not. Then the Times writes “government officials in Qatar, who had long wanted to unload the plane, had a different version of the sequence of events according to a person familiar with their timeline. They were willing to send the jet to Florida for Mr. Trump to take a personal tour, but the expectation was that the plane would be sold to the United States, not offered as a gift.” This all starts to sound a little bit like the episode where New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft handed Vladimir Putin one of his Super Bowl rings to show it off, and Putin tucked it in his pocket and declared it a gift. Presumably more stories will come out, digging a little more deeply into exactly how Donald Trump convinced Qatar to give him the plane. Regardless, like all other stories about the airplane and its opulent interior, it establishes that the one thing that is definitely not going to happen is Donald Trump letting anyone spend years ripping out all that high-end wooden leather to sweep for bugs and install missile evasion systems. “After Mr. Trump looked at the plane,” the Times writes, “one thing was clear. It was love at first sight. Flying back to Washington on one of the existing Air Force One 747s, he marveled at what he had seen of the interiors of the Qatari jet and talked about the plane as if getting it for his own use was a done deal. A new paint job, his allies in the White House figured, and a few other quick upgrades and it could be ready within the year for Mr. Trump to fly.” 

Below the plane story on page one, the headline is tensions climb as Israel's allies condemn its escalation in Gaza. The Times writes, “Israel's threats to drastically escalate the war in Gaza and its blockade of humanitarian aid to a Palestinian population at risk of famine have drawn the sharpest condemnation yet from some powerful Western allies since the conflict began 19 months ago. On Tuesday,” the Times continues, “Britain said it was suspending talks with Israel on expanding a free trade agreement the day before Britain, France and Canada had issued a rare public reprimand of Israel demanding it cease the renewed military offensive. ‘We have always supported Israel's right to defend Israelis against terrorism,’ a joint statement by the three countries said, ‘but this escalation is wholly disproportionate.’” 

Back up at the top of the page, two more pieces of fairly unvarnished Trump administration coverage. “U.S. Embraces Climate Denial In Science Cuts / Policies Throttle Ability to Respond to Crisis” is the one, and next to that is a NEWS ANALYSIS, “Trump’s Shift On Ukraine: You All Fix It / U.S. Backs Off Putin, Splitting With Allies.” 

But the streak of clear punchy headlines breaks down in the left-hand corner with “F.D.A. Will Sharpen Scrutiny On Who May Need Covid Shot,” which is a rather too generous way of describing the news that the FDA is only authorizing the next round of COVID boosters for people over 65 and for people with existing medical conditions that may render them more vulnerable to the disease that will be free to spread because everybody else won't be getting a shot. The fig leaf on this naked abandonment of public health and betrayal of even the administration's rhetoric about individual choice in healthcare is that Trump's FDA officials are saying there's not enough evidence that it's worth it to otherwise healthy individuals to get the shot. In the New England Journal of Medicine, officials wrote, “The FDA will approve vaccines for high-risk persons and at the same time demand robust gold standard data on persons at low risk.” If you miss being able to get a shot, don't worry. One thing about catching COVID is that getting it has the potential to kick you into that category of people with a long-term health condition that would qualify you for future shots. 

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