Good morning. It is April 9th. It is a bright and very cold morning in New York City, a freezing morning in fact. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average went straight down at this morning's opening, then went straight up, then straight down, currently straight up again, as investors appear to be trying and failing to land on a stable reaction to a completely unstable situation. President Donald Trump's tariff package took effect at midnight, leading China to retaliate with an 84 % tariff announcement to counter Trump's 104 % tariffs on Chinese goods and inspiring EU tariffs ranging from 10 to 25%. 

On Truth Social, the president posted, “BE COOL” (all caps) “everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before.”

The tariffs command the two lead news columns on the front of this morning's New York Times. “Brushing Off Concerns, Trump Pushes Forward With His Steep Tariffs.” In the right column under the headline is, “U.S. Signals It’s Open to Discussing Deals.” If there is a signal, there's also an awful lot of noise. “Mr. Trump said,” the Times writes, “officials would begin talks with Japan, South Korea and other nations.”

“Said” here might just mean he posted it to Truth Social. “The president,” the Times continues, “whose punitive and successive tariffs on China have triggered a potentially economically damaging trade war, also said he was open to talking to Beijing about a deal. ‘China also wants to make a deal badly, but they don't know how to get it started,’ Mr. Trump wrote on social media. We are waiting for their call. It will happen.” 

I guess you can choose to read that as openness to making a deal. If you really are desperate for it to mean that. The left hand column under the main headline is “Closings and Layoffs at Auto Factories.” 

“President Trump's 25 % tariffs on imported vehicles, which went into effect last week, are already sending tremors through the auto industry,” the Times writes, “prompting companies to stop shipping cars to the United States, shut down factories in Canada and Mexico and layoff workers in Michigan and other states. Jaguar Land Rover, based in Britain, said it would temporarily stop exporting its luxury cars to the United States. Stellantis idled factories in Canada and Mexico that make Chrysler and Jeep vehicles, and laid off 900 US workers who supplied those factories with engines and other parts. Audi, a luxury division of Volkswagen, also paused exports of cars to the United States from Europe, telling dealers to sell whatever they had on their lots. The rest of the top of the front page is taken up by a four-column overhead photograph of muddy floodwaters around a house in Frankfurt, Kentucky with an emergency electric crew paddling into the left-hand side of the frame in an inflatable boat, because our long-term self-inflicted disasters keep on happening, even while they're overshadowed by our more obviously optional and easily avoidable short-term self-inflicted disasters. 

The story we discussed in yesterday's newsletter after it broke about Trump's IRS agreeing to illegally share people's confidential personal information with immigration enforcement officials is down at the bottom of page one. The online edition of the story has now been updated to add the news from later yesterday that the acting IRS commissioner is quitting, as are the agency's chief financial officer, chief of staff, chief risk officer, and chief privacy officer. 

On the leftmost side of the page, underneath the floodwaters, is a NEWS ANALYSIS piece. “Justices Duck A Showdown / Skirting Tough Rulings on Trump’s Authority.” Adam Liptak notes the Supreme Court's sudden transition from “bold assertions of power backed by sweeping claims about the meaning of the Constitution” that it used to tear up pre-existing jurisprudence during the Biden administration, with what Liptak calls “a series of narrow and legalistic rulings that seem calculated to avoid the larger issues presented by a president rapidly working to expand power and reshape government. The justice's new approach,” Liptak writes, “appears to have multiple goals. To stay out of the political fray to maintain their legitimacy and perhaps most important to avoid a showdown with a president who has relentlessly challenged the legitimacy of the courts.” 

That seems roughly correct, but it doesn't reach the real essence of what the court has been trying to do with its interventions and the self-defeating absurdity of it all. Because what the court is really doing is using the technicalities in an effort to set aside the various court orders that the Trump administration has been refusing to obey. The real showdown is about how long the executive branch can continue to get away with complete contempt of court. And pretending that isn't happening is not going to shore up the legitimacy of the judicial branch. The story also contains the incredibly depressing sentence, “several of the court's actions have been closely divided, turning on the votes of the two justices at its ideological center, Chief Justice Roberts, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Those are the swing justices of your Supreme Court. 

In other news about how the legitimacy of the legal system is going, page A13 is divided between two stories at the bottom of the page “As White House escalates attacks on big law firms. Another braces for blowback.” This one's about how Cadwallader, Wickersham, and Taft is the latest firm to be extorted by the White House. “One of Mr. Trump's advisors, the Times writes, “has been in touch with the firm to suggest that it sign a deal in which it would offer tens of millions of dollars in pro bono legal services to causes that the Trump administration supports. While Cadwallader was not explicitly threatened with an executive order, people briefed on the matter said, the implicit message encouraging a deal was clear. Sign, or face the possibility of an executive order that, however legally dubious, could nonetheless hobble the firm's business.” 

And above that, taking up the rest of the page, the story is “Justice Department lawyers are laboring to justify Trump's moves in court, squeezed between judges who demand answers, and protecting leaders' agenda.” 

“Government litigators,” the Times writes, “their ranks increasingly depleted, often find themselves in court with few facts to defend policies they cannot explain, according to current and former officials. Career lawyers representing the government have a long tradition of arguing for the goals of Republican or Democratic administrations regardless of their personal views,” the Times writes, and then the Times constructs a truly amazing dichotomy What is different now,” they say, “is that they increasingly feel trapped between President Trump's partisan political appointees who insist on a maximalist approach and judges who demand comprehensible answers to basic questions.” By “maximalist approach,” what the Times really means is “minimalist approach”since what the Trump administration is doing is sending lawyers out to argue things that have no legal basis. 

Back on page one, speaking of fake things, there is a picture of two puppies that are part of an all media blitz by a company that is seeing which major publications it can sucker into repeating its claim that it has genetically engineered dire wolves. There'll be much more on that in the newsletter today. You have to go to page A11 to find a huge piece of just plain news, that is, a terrible and unexpected thing that happened in the world. The headline is, “Dozens Dead in Dominican Republic Nightclub Roof Collapse. From Santo Domingo,” The Times writes, “Using heavy machinery, drones, dogs, and dozens of rescuers, officials worked frantically on Tuesday to find survivors of a deadly roof collapse at a nightclub in the Dominican Republic, where the authorities said at least 67 people had died.” That death toll as of this morning is up to 113. “The collapse happened during the concert at Jet Set, a popular nightclub whose Monday night dance party was a decades-old tradition frequented by a who's who of Dominican society, many of whom were still trapped inside. Among those either killed or injured, the Times writes, “were a governor, a member of the Dominican Republic's Congress, and two former US Major League Baseball players.” Rubi Perez, the singer who was performing at the time of the collapse, was also killed. The dead ball players were short time major leaver Tony Blanco and the longtime pitcher Octavio Dotel, whose employment with 13 different teams made him the second most traveled player of all time. 

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 unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.