Good morning. It is April 21st. It's the Monday after spring break, a gray morning in New York and a cooler one. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Pope Francis died today at the age of 88 after one last Easter observance at the Vatican in his final sermon delivered on his behalf after he blessed the crowd on St. Peter's Square from his wheelchair. He said, what a great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day in the many conflicts raging in different parts of our world. How much violence we see often even within families, directed at women and children. How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized and migrants. 

On Good Friday, his message during the stations, the cross had included saying that todays builders of Babel tell us there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of hell. Yesterday also the pope met with vice president JD Vance and gave some candy to his children, having previously sent lower ranking officials to deal with him, to have what the Vatican described, according to the AP as an exchange of opinions, including over migrants and refugees and current conflicts.

The vice president's office left that part out, and according to the AP reported that he and the Vatican secretary of state discussed their shared religious faith, Catholicism in the United States, the plight of persecuted Christian communities around the world and President Trump's commitment to restoring world peace. 

And speaking of how Donald Trump is implementing his commitment to world peace, on the front of this morning's New York Times, two columns wide in the lead news slot, the headline is “DEFENSE HEAD SAID TO SEND WAR PLAN TO SECOND GROUP / Hegseth’s Family Members and Lawyer Are Linked to an Encrypted Chat.”  

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Times writes, “shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15th in a private signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.” This is not the same chat as the one that accidentally had Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg receiving Hegseth's updates on military planning in Yemen. “Unlike the chat in which the Atlantic was mistakenly included,” the Times writes, “the newly revealed one was created by Mr. Hegseth. It included his wife and about a dozen other people from his personal and professional inner circle in January before his confirmation as defense secretary and was named ‘Defense Team Huddle,’ the people familiar with the chat said. He used his private phone rather than his government one to access the signal chat.” The Times' context paragraph about all this is a little bit backward and occluded. The Times writes, “The previously unreported existence of a second Signal chat in which Mr. Hegseth shared highly sensitive military information is the latest in a series of developments that have put his management and judgment under scrutiny.” 

Here, what the Times is being a little bit opaque about is not only its own role, as usual, in creating, if not constituting, the disembodied scrutiny that it writes about, but the news value of the fact that the news story exists at all. That is, that four different people are willing to talk about the contents of a group chat that the Secretary of Defense had originally set up for a dozen of his close personal contacts. The original group chat scandal had not really been tracking the normal progression of a damaging political story, thanks to the Trump administration's blanket position of never admitting error and never making apologies. When the White House is ideologically opposed to the whole idea of anyone taking a fall, the standard sequence by which someone like Hegseth becomes a fall guy doesn't really work. Nevertheless, things did not stabilize at the Pentagon. Over the weekend, three high-level Pentagon officials, two of whom were in that group chat, issued a public complaint about having been fired after being, according to a report in Politico, “under investigation for a series of leaks that included reports about Elon Musk's visit to the Pentagon, military plans for the Panama Canal, a second carrier heading to the Red Sea, and a pause in the collection of intelligence for Ukraine.” Hegseth’s Chief of Staff, who was also in the chat, left his job on Friday for reassignment within the Defense Department. 

Covering that news, Politico wrote, “there is a complete meltdown in the building and this is really reflecting on the Secretary's leadership, said a senior defense official. Pete Hegseth has surrounded himself with some people who don't have his interests at heart.” Another way of looking at that would be that anyone who had Pete Hegseth's interests at heart would not have allowed someone with a well-attested drinking problem and a history of catastrophic mismanagement in even small organization settings to take on the genuinely colossally difficult job of running the Department of Defense. 

Speaking of major departments in bad shape, on the left-hand side of the page, down just above the fold. The news is “STATE DEPT. FACES PLAN FOR BIG CUTS / Draft Order Would Shed Africa Operations.”

“A draft of a Trump administration executive order,” the Times writes, “proposes a drastic restructuring of the State Department that includes eliminating almost all of its Africa operations and shutting down embassies and consulates across the continent, according to American officials and a copy of the document. The draft also calls for cutting offices at State Department headquarters that address climate change and refugee issues, as well as democracy and human rights concerns.” Story goes on to say, “Secretary of State Marco Rubio, wrote a short comment on social media after this article was published, calling it fake news. There are no indications that Mr. Rubio or his top aides have signed off on the document, though they have been working on a reorganization of the State Department.” The whole plan, as reported, is so absurdly drastic that the part where they're planning to essentially dissolve the existing foreign service doesn't arrive until after the jump. 

“The draft executive order,” the Times writes, “calls for ending the foreign service exam for aspiring diplomats, and it lays out new hiring criteria that includes alignment with the president's foreign policy vision.” And in a remarkably naked expression of exactly what that foreign policy vision is, the story circles back to the Africa part. “One of the most drastic proposed changes is to eliminate the Bureau of African Affairs, which oversees policy in sub-Saharan Africa. It would be replaced by a much smaller special envoy office for African Affairs that would report to the National Security Council. The office would focus on a handful of issues, including coordinated counter-terrorism operations and strategic extraction and trade of critical natural resources.” That's the Africa agenda. Undeclared warfare and resource extraction.

The maximalist Russiagate interpretations of Trump's actions through the years have always seemed a little too pat, even if they hold up much better than the minimizing account of Trump's relations with Russia that he and Bill Barr successfully foisted off on the press in his first term. Yes, Russia openly intervened to try to help him win the 2016 election. Yes, Trump and his people publicly and privately welcomed Russian assistance. Yes, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump share a taste for authoritarianism and a hatred of liberal Republican self-government, but really isn't the claim that Trump is just a stooge whose first priority is to serve Putin's interests a cartoonish evasion of the United States' own responsibility for the swiftly realized fascist potential built into our politics. Absolutely, definitely, but, it’s really hard to look at the global shutdown of not just American soft power, but American power at all, without wondering what other explanation could really properly account for it. 

Back to live news events. Four members of Congress are following up on Senator Chris Van Hollen's trip to El Salvador to look into the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia last week with a trip of their own today.

Reuters writes “US representatives Maxwell Frost of Florida, Robert Garcia of California, Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Maxine Dexter of Oregon are in El Salvador to facilitate Garcia's return to the United States, they said in a statement. 

The White House, meanwhile, reiterated its current position that its previous position that it had made a mistake by unlawfully removing a Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, was never really the administration's position, and that there were no mistakes involved at all.

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 can. And if nothing too unpredictable gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.