Good morning. It is April 16th. It is a cool and dry 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. 

The Wall Street Journal has a long and extremely upsetting report on the inner mechanics of Elon Musk's personal baby farming operation. The disgruntled right-wing influencer, Ashley St. Clair, with whom the world's richest person apparently fathered one of his many children, apparently pulled back the curtain on her share of the process by which Musk recruits women for breeding purposes and uses his wealth for leverage over them to try to keep the process secret and under control. It opens by describing a conversation between St. Clair and Jared Birchall, who the paper describes as Musk's longtime fixer. “Birchall,” the Journal writes, “offered St. Clair some advice. His boss was ‘a very big hearted, kind and generous person,’ he said. But Musk had a different side. ‘When a mother of his child goes the legal route in these discussions, that always, always leads to a worse outcome for that woman than what it would have been otherwise,’ Birchall told the 26 year old. Plus, he said, Musk wasn't sure the child was his.” Birchall, the Journal wrote “manages the financial and privacy deals Musk wants for the women raising the world's richest man's babies. “Musk,” the Journal writes, “has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zillis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur say they believe the true number of Musk's children is much higher than publicly known. Musk offered St. Clair $15 million and $100,000 a month in support in exchange for her silence about the child, whom they named Romulus. Similar agreements had been negotiated with other mothers of Musk's children, Birchall told Sinclair.” The hideous details just pile up. “Musk,” the Journal writes, “refers to his offspring as a legion, a reference to the ancient military units that could contain thousands of soldiers and were key to extending the reach of the Roman Empire. During St. Clair's pregnancy, the Journal adds, suggested that they bring in other women to have even more of their children faster. ‘To reach legion level before the apocalypse,’ he said to St. Clair in a text message viewed by the Wall Street Journal, ‘we will need to use surrogates.’” The story documents Musk's fixation on falling birth rates, which he's publicly expressed on many occasions. “Separately,” the story says, “Musk has said he is concerned about what he called third world countries having higher birth rates than the US and Europe, aperson familiar with the conversation said.” Among the targets of Musk's attempts to find more vessels for his breeding are online influencers who depend on traffic and attention on x.com, which Musk now has the power to directly manipulate. “One woman he approached,” the Journal writes, “worried that turning him down could hurt her earnings.” In addition to a cornucopia of details about Musk's perversions and pseudoscientific fixations. The story also describes how just plain bad these deals appear to be for his chosen partners. In St. Clair's case, the Journal writes that the offer was “a one-time fee of $15 million for a home and living expenses, plus an additional $100,000 a month until the baby turned 21.” But the Journal goes on to say, “the agreement prevented her from speaking about Musk in relation to the child or disparaging him, but didn't bar Musk from speaking negatively about her if he wanted. St. Clair would have to pay back the $15 million lump sum if she broke the agreement. Also,” the Journal writes “the agreement didn't provide support for their child if he became gravely ill or a trust fund or life insurance if Musk died before the child turned 21.” And that is what it looks like when you want to dominate the future but also are incapable of imagining a world without you in it. 

Speaking of the inability to imagine the future, the New York Times published a story this morning, under the headline, “Law Firms Made Deals With Trump. Now He Wants More From Them.” 

“To avoid retribution,” the subhead says, “big firms agreed to provide free legal services for uncontroversial causes. To the White House, that could mean negotiating trade deals — or even defending the president and his allies.” The story begins “when some of the nation's biggest law firms agreed to deals with President Trump, the terms appeared straightforward. In return for escaping the full force of his retribution campaign, the firms would do some free legal work on behalf of largely uncontroversial causes like helping veterans. Mr. Trump, it turns out, has a far more expansive view of what those firms can be called on to do.” Goes on to say that he has hinted that he sees the promises of nearly one billion dollars in pro bono legal services that he has extracted from the elite law firms — including Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher — as a legal war chest to be used as he wishes.” Now, I haven't been to law school or taken the bar exam and no one is paying me millions of dollars a year for legal work. Nevertheless, the idea that the terms of those deals appeared straightforward is somewhere between false and delusional. The terms about what the firms were going to do for Trump were strikingly vague and when the very first deal was announced the version of the terms that Trump published in public reportedly did not match the terms that Paul, Weiss believed it had agreed to in private. Nevertheless the other firms lined up to get more of the same, and now to their shock the president is tightening the screws on them all of this raises the question of why anyone would hire someone as gullible devoid of common sense and unable to read basic text as these expensive lawyers, to handle their legal affairs or anything else. The only argument they could make in their favor, which is apparently the argument that sealed all these deals, is that by bribing the administration, they bought favors and presidential goodwill for their future clients, especially in mergers and acquisitions. But the point of this morning's news update is they didn't even do that because all you get from bribing Trump is a demand for more bribes. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news column is a NEWS ANALYSIS piece on which the Times headline staff outdoes itself, with “Trump Flirts With Defying Court Orders / Scholars Raise Alarm About Path Ahead.” Countless people online already went ahead and made the joke about Trump flirting with defying court orders the way he flirts with women. The lead of the story likewise insists on keeping things tepid. “The Trump administration's compliance with court orders started with foot dragging, moved to semantic gymnastics, and has now arrived at the cusp of outright defiance.” Here's how the Times describes the “cusp of outright defiance.” 

“Large swaths of President Trump's agenda have been tied up in court, challenged in scores of lawsuits. The administration has frozen money that the courts have ordered it to spend. It has blocked the Associated Press from the White House press pool despite a court order saying that the news organization be allowed to participate, and it ignored a judge's instruction to return planes carrying Venezuelan immigrants bound for a notorious prison in El Salvador. But, exhibit A in what legal scholars say is a deeply worrisome and escalating trend is the administration's combative response to the Supreme Court's ruling last week in the case of a Salvadoran immigrant. The administration deported the immigrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador despite a 2019 ruling from an immigration judge specifically and directly prohibiting that very thing.” Then it gets into how the administration has been simply not complying with Judge Paul Aziz's order, affirmed by a unanimous Supreme Court to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return, and has instead started disputing the previously undisputed fact that his abduction was unjustified and carried out in error.

After the jump, looking for expert guidance to explain the situation, the story goes on to say, “Assessing whether, when and how much the administration is defying the courts is complicated by a new phenomenon, legal scholars said, pointing to what they called a collapse in the credibility of representations by the Justice Department. These days, its lawyers are sometimes sent to court with no information, sometimes instructed to make arguments that are factually or legally baseless and sometimes punished for being honest. Defiance, then, may not be a straightforward declaration that the government will not comply with the ruling. It may be an appearance by a hapless lawyer who has or claims to have no information. Or it may be a legal argument so outlandish as to amount to insolence. It then quotes Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas Law School saying, “I would like to think that at least some of the Trump administration's arguments have crossed that line, but frankly, I don't really know where the line is.” 

Above that on the jump page is the story about how Judge Xinis yesterday ordered the government to undergo two weeks of discovery to document their handling of the Abrego Garcia case and establish whether it amounts to contempt. 

But meanwhile, this morning, against that backdrop of slow procedural escalation, White House obfuscation and scholarly hair splitting, Judge James Boasberg, who had issued the order that was supposed to have prevented the flights to El Salvador in the first place, hit his own limit and ruled that the flirtation with defying court orders had been fully consummated by the administration. 

“The court,” he wrote, “ultimately determines that the government's actions on that day demonstrate a willful disregard for its order sufficient for the court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the government in criminal contempt. If defendants opt to purge their contempt,” the judge ordered, “hey shall file by April 23rd, 2025, a declaration explaining the steps they have taken and will take to do so. If defendants opt not to purge their contempt, they shall instead file by April 23rd, 2025, declarations identifying the individuals who, with knowledge of the court's class-wide temporary restraining order, made the decision not to halt the transfer of class members out of U.S. custody on March 15th and 16th, 2025. 

Elsewhere on the front of today's print edition, in another defeat of deference to the administration's point of view. The headline is, “Tariffs of 10% Now Seem Low But Can Still Batter Economy.” As the Trump administration's performance of replacing incomprehensibly apocalyptic tariff levels with tariff levels merely unprecedented in living memory becomes simply the observation of some disembodied observer. As the Times starts by describing how people received Trump's campaign proposal for a 10 % tariff as a shocking and radical move and probably just a bargaining position and then writes, “now, after a rapid fire series of announcements from the White House that promised imposed, reversed, delayed, decreased and increased tariffs, the 10 % solution is looking like the most temperate choice rather than the most revolutionary, especially now that a red hot trade war between China and the United States is blazing.” Looks to whom, exactly? And how did that trade war get to blazing?

Next to that, the story is “Trump’s Trade War Threatens Talks to Fix Other China Issues,” about how all the other things that the Trump administration claimed it was going to negotiate with China about have unavoidably been pushed aside by the trade war. “Mr. Trump's decision to stake everything on winning a trade war with China threatens to choke off those negotiations before they even begin. And if they do start up, Mr. Trump may be entering them alone because he has alienated the allies who in recent years had come to a common approach in countering Chinese power. In conversations over 10 days, several administration officials insisting that they could not speak on the record described a White House deeply divided on how to handle Beijing. “The trade war erupted” the Times writes “before the many factions inside the administration even had time to stake out their positions, much less decide which issues mattered most.” 

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 through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those along if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.