Good morning. It is May 5th. It is a damp, gray, chilly morning in New York City, opening what's supposed to be a damp, gray week, 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, in another flurry of random activity on social media, declared, among other things, that he wants to impose a 100 % tariff on foreign-made movies. All of Trump's tariff powers are legally dubious, but this particular one appears to be flatly banned by the text of even the law that he's exploiting to try to impose all his other tariffs, as in films are specifically outside the scope of the law. Even given that it happened over the weekend, it seems a little late in the whole process of Trump's aggressive, unto extralegal tariff campaign, for newsrooms not to automatically know the hard limits on the statute that he's trying to use. But so far, outlets are just sticking with taking Trump's declarations at face value and gesturing its skepticism toward his announcements by trying to reason out from first principles what the practical obstacles would be, rather than starting from the question of whether he has any legal basis whatsoever for saying he can do these things. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news spot, two columns wide, is taken up by exactly the story that belongs on the front page. “Trumps’ 3-Continent Rush To Profit Has Few Parallels,” that's Trump's with an S apostrophe rather than a P apostrophe S, ““Trumps’ 3-Continent Rush To Profit Has Few Parallels / As Sons Promote Deals to Enrich President, White House Claims ‘No Conflicts.’” That is the story. The president and his family are on a spectacular spree of bribery and other self-enrichment that would all on its own have constituted the greatest scandal in American political history had it happened any time other than 2025.

“A contest of sorts,” the Times writes, “has played out across Europe, the United States, and the Middle East in recent days, as President Trump's two older sons have pursued a blitz of family money-making ventures capitalizing on their father's name and power, each seemingly trying to outdo the other. It is a rush to cash in that involves billions of dollars with few precedents in American history. A luxury hotel in Dubai,” the Times writes, “a second high-end residential tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, two cryptocurrency ventures based in the United States, a new golf course and villa complex in Qatar, and a new private club in Washington. In many cases, these new deals promoted over the last week will personally benefit not only Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., but also President Trump himself.” Then the Times veers into little bit of self-expiation. “The marathon of deal-making has been so rapid,” the Times writes, “that many elements have drawn limited public attention in the United States despite most of it being out in the open. This is in part because the sons appeared before mostly fawning crowds, but also because President Trump, his appointees and his billionaire advisor, Elon Musk, were making headlines with their own steady stream of norm breaking controversies.” Nothing like a front page story in the New York Times that treats public attention and “making headlines” as some sort of outside process that the newspaper can only observe and report on. 

But anyway, here the paper is, noting that the president stands to personally profit from many of these deals and delivering one appalling nugget after another. “Eric Trump,” the Times writes, “noted that many of the ventures they are promoting, from crypto to real estate, were underway before their father was re-elected.” That's a good one, as if the opinions of the crypto industry in no way shaped the outcome of that election. Then an even better commentary. We get the sentence, “Donald Trump Jr. rejected any suggestion that he was trading on his father's name.” Let's wind that part back. [REWIND SOUND] “Donald Trump Jr. rejected any suggestion that he was trading on his father's name.” One more time. [REWIND SOUND]  “Donald Trump Jr. rejected any suggestion that he was trading on his father's saying he has been a businessman his entire adult life.” Who, boy. What else? They are opening a private club in Washington, D.C. called Executive Branch for a half million dollar membership per person, recreating, the Times writes, “the role previously served by the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, where donors and acolytes of the president gathered until the family sold it off after Mr. Trump's first term.” It's almost as if the purpose of having such a space depends entirely on there being a presidency for people to court. “The club soon will most likely be jammed with Trump family, friends, business executives and members of the Trump administration, but will be off limits to members of the public and most members of the news media. At a launch party at a hotel,” the Times writes, “attendees included Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Paul Atkins, the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The founding members of the club,” the Times continues, “which has already sold all of its membership slots, according to organizers, include Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the cryptocurrency executives whose company Gemini Trust had been targeted by the SEC until Mr. Trump named new agency leaders who in April put a hold on the federal lawsuit.” The story then says that another founding member is the lobbyist for the crypto firm Tether. And the owners besides Donald Trump Jr. include Zach and Alec Witkoff, the sons of Mr. Trump's Middle East envoy and a venture capital firm that benefited from Trump's shutdown of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the vicious thick-headed Silicon Valley buffoon David Sachs, Peter Thiel's lifelong co-conspirator in right-wing advocacy. Then the story turns to the Trump meme coin and Javier Selgas, chief executive at FR8 Tech, a shipping company, quite possibly that asinine spelling is pronounced “freight tech,” but the Indignity Morning podcast's dedication to accurate pronunciation only goes so far. That shipping company “announced this past week,” the Times writes “while Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were abroad that his Monterey, Mexico based company would spend $20 million to buy Trump meme coin tokens.” I also don't know how to pronounce “dollar sign Trump,” which is the name of the coin. Strump. Dollar Trump. “Buying the tokens.” The story continues. “In essence, giving money to the Trump family, is ‘an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced and free trade between Mexico and the U.S.’ Mr. Selvas said in the statement, which was also filed with the SEC as his company is publicly traded.” Hey, the SEC. That's the same SEC whose chair was at the publicity party for the Trump son's private club. Bringing more characters looking back around later on, the story says “on a crypto conference panel in Dubai, Eric Trump sat next to Zach Witkoff, one of the founders of the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, who announced that a venture capital firm backed by the government of Abu Dhabi would invest $2 billion using a form of digital currency offered by World Liberty.” So the son of the president and the head of the president's family cryptocurrency company, who is the son of the president's Middle East envoy, went to the Middle East to raise $2 billion. 

That fact wraps around from the next to the last to the last column on the jump page of the story, because there is so very, very, much else. 

Next to that on page one is a four column picture of a woman in Gaza cooking a piece of flatbread In a makeshift kitchen open to the air surrounded by twisted rebar and other rubble. “Choked by Siege, Gaza Aid Nears ‘Total Collapse’ / Lack of Food and Drugs Results in a Surge of Preventable Deaths.” 

“It has,” the Times writes, “been more than 60 days since Israel ordered a halt to all humanitarian aid entering Gaza. No food, fuel, or even medicine. As the phone calls pour in, Muneer Alboursh, the director general of Gaza's health ministry, is running out of answers. The longer Israel's total siege of the enclave grinds on,” the Times writes, “the more doctors call to ask where they can find medicine to keep patients alive. Some patients call them up themselves, people with treatable heart problems or kidney failure to ask if there is no medicine, what else can they try? ‘There is no advice I can give them,’ he said. ‘In most cases, those patients die.’ Israel,” the Times writes, has argued that its blockade is lawful and that Gaza still has enough available provisions, but humanitarian groups and European officials accuse Israel of using aid as a political tool and warn that the total blockade violates international law.” 

Down below the fold, the Times summons what may be the most accursed joint byline its newsroom can possibly generate, bringing together bogus medical breakthrough specialist Gina Kolata with dullard culture warmonger Jeremy W. Peters under the headline, “Fighting Trump But Also Trying To Fix Harvard,” in which Harvard president, Alan Garber, forfeits much of the goodwill that he won when his university refused to accept the Trump administration's demands and took it to court instead, by giving the Times an interview, which two of its most tendentious reporters were able to characterize as his saying that Harvard has a campus culture problem that needs urgent fixing. “Harvard, he says,” still in paraphrase, “has often shut out voices that many liberals disagree with, he said, and it has allowed anti-Semitism to go unchecked.” You have to take the jump and get to the final section in the final column before the reporters put that into a little more context. “In recent days,” they finally write, “Dr. Garber released a report outlining problems with both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on campus, apologized for both issues and promised more changes.” Peters and Kolata then write, “he has also gone beyond the focus on anti-Semitism, taking on the hotly contested issue of race and diversity,” immediately deleting the Islamophobia part of his analysis because it's not the story they want to tell. And if I got into the other thing about that story, we would blow past all respectable podcast limits. So I think it's going to need to be written about in the newsletter. 

On page A13, The headline is “Trump waivers on due process rights under the Constitution,” which is the headline writer's gloss on the fact that he went on “Meet the Press,” was asked if citizens and non-citizens both got due process, and replied, “I don't know. I'm not. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know.” Then in a weirdly inside out construction, the Times adds, “Mr. Trump responded, ‘I don't know one’ more time, and referred to his ‘brilliant lawyers’ when NBC's Kristen Welker asked whether as president he needed to uphold the Constitution of the United States.” If the president says he doesn't know whether he has an obligation to follow the precise text of his oath of office, that really rates a cleaner and more prominent treatment. 

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 with your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Please do, for real, send those in. And if nothing unexpected, like last week's bout of the cold, gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.