Good morning. It is April 30th. It is bright and pleasant once again 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. 

President Donald Trump sat down for an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News, during which the president made it unequivocally and passionately clear that when he displayed a photograph earlier, of the hand, of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration wrongfully, by its own admission, abducted to El Salvador, in an attempt to prove that Abrego Garcia's tattoos established that he is a member of the MS-13 gang, he was not simply relaying a meme created by white nationalists that purported to translate the symbols on Abrego Garcia's fingers as a sort of rebus for MS-13, but had mistaken the caption added to the photo for the tattoos themselves. He furiously insisted to Moran that Abrego Garcia Literally had the characters ms-1 and 3 Tattooed on his knuckles, even though not even the people who created the meme or making that claim. That is, he was too confused to even understand the nature of the hoax that he was supposed to be relaying, and created a different, even more foolish and obviously unbelievable hoax in his own mind, to believe in. The president of the United States appeared to sincerely believe, to the point of returning to the subject over and over again, and demanding that the reporter interviewing him say yes to his point of view, that Abrego Garcia is walking around with a badly spaced standard computer font tattoo across his knuckles, declaring himself a member of a criminal gang. I've been trying as hard as I could to give him the benefit of the doubt on the question of whether when he talks about immigrants coming from insane asylums, that's because he doesn't know the difference between an insane asylum and the protected status known as “asylum,” but the tattoo thing really unambiguously established that the man's mental furnishings really are busted up into pieces and piled into a bonfire in the middle of the parlor. 

Elsewhere in the interview, discussing Abrego Garcia, Moran suggested that Trump could pick up the phone and get him back, to which Trump replied, “I could.” But then went on to say that his lawyers aren't going to help bring Abrego Garcia back, which was simultaneously a bizarre denial of the responsibility for being in charge, and an assertion of the power to ignore the Supreme Court's order to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return. Under the weird plea of helplessness or implicit confession of incompetence, what the president did was, with the cameras rolling, declared that he had the power to comply with the Supreme Court's order, but that he wasn't going to do it.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the gross domestic product of the United States decreased 0.3 % in the first quarter this year, going from positive growth to contraction in part, according to Bloomberg, “because of a huge increase in the trade deficit produced by Donald Trump's trade war as Americans loaded up on imports ahead of the tariffs to stockpile for the coming shutdown of trading.”

And the Trump presidency has also now disrupted the front page layout of the New York Times. This morning's paper goes full width in sentence case with the headline, “There have never been 100 days like this,” complete with a period for punctuation at the end, over a page built on four wide format columns, two of text, two of photos. The rightmost column is a NEWS ANALYSIS by Peter Baker, “Driven by Vengeance, Trump Shreds Rules On His Crusade.” The story begins strongly enough with an image of truly malevolent and out-of-control narcissism. “At the entrance of the Oval Office,” Baker writes, “where the president and his visitors can see it every day, hangs the mugshot taken of a glowering Donald J. Trump after he was arrested and charged with racketeering to overthrow an election. A couple of hundred feet away, In the grand foyer of the White House State floor, where the official portraits of past presidents in solemn poses are on display, hangs a painting of a defiant Mr. Trump, blood splattered on his face by a would-be assassin's bullet, angrily pumping his fist and shouting, fight, fight.” Already there, the writing is starting to slip away from Baker a little bit. Unless the painting actually has a cartoon speech bubble on it. He's not really shouting anything, Or at most he might have his mouth open to shout “fight” once, But there are bigger troubles due ahead. “There is a reason,” the story continues, “he has placed these images in positions of prominence. They reflect the crucibles of a man who escaped threats of prison and death in his quest for vindication and vengeance. They fuel his self-authored narrative as a man of destiny saved by God to save America.” So they're reflecting a crucible, that was also an escape on a quest, but mainly here is the Times in history writing mode, trying to inscribe its institutional delusion as a small c conservative, fuddy duddy liberal institution, that drastic action and the breaking of rules ought to be understood to be inherently alarming. 

“In the opening chapter of this new term,” the Times writes, “Mr. Trump has acted like a man on a mission, moving with almost messianic fervor to transform America from top to bottom and exact retribution against enemies at the same time. He appears intent on demolishing the old order, no matter the collateral damage, putting his personal imprint not just on government and foreign affairs, but on almost every aspect of national life, including business, culture, sports, academia, the legal world, and the media. Through sheer force of will and brazen assertions of presidential power, Mr. Trump has done more to change the trajectory of the country in three months than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the notion of a first hundred days presidential yardstick.” 

Whatever the Times may think this sort of language is supposed to do, what it does is present this confused old man, who again, can't tell an added photo caption from an actual tattoo in a picture, as a great man, doing great things on a monumental scale. Baker goes on, “but where Roosevelt used his early weeks to build a new edifice, Mr. Trump has used his to tear it down. In effect, he is trying to repeal the liberal social compact and international system that Roosevelt constructed. ‘Unwinding neoliberalism,’ as one aide put it.” 

Okay, so here Baker is just being illiterate. Franklin D. Roosevelt was not a neoliberal, he was a liberal, and what Trump has been smashing is not the late 20th century into 21st century neoliberal order, but liberalism itself. The notion that you can't be grabbed off the street and thrown in a prison camp in Louisiana because you wrote an op-ed in a student newspaper, mildly critical of existing policy. When the government signs a contract to say, provide medications to hundreds of thousands of people with life and death at stake, it can't capriciously yank away the medicine on the capricious orders of an unelected power broker strung out on ketamine. That the government does not give orders to colleges about what they're allowed to teach. That the criminal justice system is not an implement for exercising the monarch's personal will against his enemies. That when a court issues an order, the president and his underlings obey the order. “Nearly every day brings a fresh breach of what were once thought to be the rules,” Baker writes, “moves that have thrilled his insurgent supporters and petrified his nervous opponents.” Just one hideous word choice after another. “Rules” instead of laws. Like shackling someone and throwing them into a foreign prison without a hearing, is the same thing as smoking a cigarette in the boys bathroom. “His nervous opponents being petrified.” Terrified is not the same as nervous, and last I saw, there were millions of them out in the streets. 

On the left-hand side of the page, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman do a bit of a better job. “From his first hours in office,” they write, “he has driven domestic, economic, and foreign policy in risky new directions, taken a chainsaw to the federal workforce, challenged the authority of the courts, and sought to purge liberal influence from government, education, and culture. The result has been a blur of new initiatives, judicial, political and economic backlash and neck-snapping reversals. It has tested the nation's ability to process disruption, and,” parallelism error coming up here, “and of American democracy's resilience in the face of a president whose views of his power have prompted warnings of creeping authoritarianism.” There's the old Times reflex. The creeping authoritarianism has to be pushed off to a warning from somebody rather unspecified, but at least it gets at the fact that he's erratic and dangerous and not just bold and unleashing his will. 

The piece continues, “the conflicts of one day regularly give way to wholly new ones with stunning rapidity. Pardoning January sixth riders, stripping out of favor officials and former advisors of security details, proposing to turn Gaza into a resort town and Canada into a 51st blaming a plane crash on diversity initiatives. Installing his personal lawyers to run the Justice Department, firing Inspectors General, closing down USAID, igniting trade wars, berating Ukraine's president in the Oval Office, deporting migrants without due process, and edging toward a constitutional crisis by defying judges. “Edging toward” is a little bit soft, but beyond that, it's a nice capsule roundup of bad, selfish, senseless things being done to the detriment of everyone.

Or you could just go inside the paper, skip past the first-draft-of-history textbook modular boxes on themes like “foreign policy, soft is out and raw power is back in, immigration, fear spreads as due process falls away,” and just to get to today's headlines about developments in current events, not a grand survey of the first hundred days, but just a look at what was going on, on day 99.

• A mother and father were deported. What happened to their child? 
• Federal Watchdog opens dozens of inquiries into Trump's withholding of funds. • Trump expels scientists working on climate report for 2028. And, 
• Lab animals euthanized as White House slashes research funding. 

Or, if that's not enough to remind everyone where we are, there's also a 16 page standalone special report section, which is just a straight timeline of Trump's major actions day by day. 

For instance, “Day 76, April 5th, revoke the visas held by South Sudanese passport holders, put on leave a Justice Department lawyer who questioned the decision to deport a Maryland man to El Salvador, and fired U.S. aid workers in the quake zone in Myanmar.” Ninety-eight more of those in the section, and more than 1,300 scheduled for the future.

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 Max 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.