Good morning. It is May 6th. It is another gray morning in New York City with showers coming and going. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

One thing that is missing from this morning is your Indignity Morning Podcast's physical copy of the New York Times. There is neither a bagged one nor a soggy, unbagged one anywhere to be found, and so this edition is going to face the news with only minimal hierarchical guidance. 

The front page at least is available via PDF online. The lead news column is a single news column in which the Times is carrying forward the standard scandal coverage playbook after yesterday's belated but wide ranging look at the globe-spanning network for self-enrichment that's been built by Donald Trump and his children. Today's step in the sequence is the political response. “DEMOCRATS BLAST CRYPTO DEALINGS OF TRUMP FAMILY / CALL FOR TOUGHER BILL / Two Senators Also Seek Investigation, Citing National Security.” 

“Senate Democrats, the Times writes, are demanding changes to cryptocurrency legislation pending in Congress, responding partly to growing evidence that the Trump family is using its connections and President Trump's power to profit from crypto trading. The pushback intensified late last week,” the Times writes, “after a closed door meeting among Senate Democrats in which Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, told colleagues they should not commit to voting for the so-called Genius Act, a bill backed by the crypto industry. For months, the bill had appeared to be gliding toward passage with support from both parties, and it was scheduled for a procedural vote this week. But in the meeting, Senate Democrats expressed concern that the legislation would directly benefit the Trump family's crypto business, citing reporting by the New York Times.” That's the piece of the story that the Times had reported last week, originally, about how the Trump family collected $2 billion from a fund backed by the government of Abu Dhabi as a meme coin investment, which is to say an investment in nothing but the gesture of making an investment.

Anyway, New York's junior senator Kirsten Gillibrand, one of the bill's sponsors and the crypto industry's warmest friend on the Democratic side of the Senate aisle, is still trying to move the bill forward. 

Next to that, on the uncanny smooth simulacrum of the paper front page, the second news column is, “Vast Tent City For Deportees Fell Far Short / Guantánamo Has Held Fewer Than 500.” After Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's big rollout of a giant tent city where the administration declared its intention to keep tens of thousands of migrants, “those tents,” the Times writes, “have been inventoried and stashed for possible future use. Over the weekend,” the Times reports, “the task force in charge of migrant detention at Guantanamo Bay was holding 32 migrants awaiting deportation and had about 725 staff members, mostly uniformed army and marine forces, with 100 employed by ICE as security officers or contractors. That is more than 22 uniformed military and ICE workers for each migrant.” 

That is better news than if the administration were actually running its own vast offshore concentration camp in Cuba, but it's also one more demonstration that the administration's theater of cruelty toward immigrants is also a theater of waste. 

The rest of the top of the virtual page is a four-column photograph of a vast, flat, snowy landscape with some itty-bitty wind turbines on it under a sky roughly the same color as the snow. It's not the most intense use of negative space on the page, because down below it, below what I think the fold would be, there's a picture of Diana Ross dressed for the Met Gala with a blinding white train on her gown, spreading away down the steps, without the print edition of the paper to study the dots on, it’s hard to say which one has the most purely inkless space in it, but the blue tint to the snowscape seems like it would have to make Diana Ross the winner. 

The snowy field points to a story inside the paper on page A14 about how Donald Trump's agenda of cutting clean energy funding has the congressional Republicans who represent Alaska concerned about losing power projects meant to replace the extremely expensive process of transporting fossil fuels into the middle of nowhere. 

There is no such thing as a page A14 online, just the web page for the story, which contains some remarkably trippy animated visuals of the view through a small plane's windshield, complete with turning propeller as it approaches a snowy runway and of passing tracks of white landscape thickly studded with dark evergreens with their long shadows spreading out on the snow. Wouldn't have gotten that from the physical newspaper, at least not with current technologies.

On the left side of the page, below the snow photo, the headline is, “‘INTENSIVE’ PUSH PLANNED IN GAZA / Palestinian Population to Be Moved to South.” The outright elimination of Gaza, or at least the attempt to do it, seems to be at hand. “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel,” the Times writes, “declared on Monday that his country was on the eve of a forceful entry to Gaza after his security cabinet approved a new plan for tens of thousands of additional soldiers to seize and hold territory in the embattled enclave and relocate Palestinians to the south. ‘It is time to launch the concluding moves,’ Mr. Netanyahu said the military officials told him, adding that the new campaign would help bring home the hostages still being held in Gaza. The prime minister said he believes ‘we are not done. We are before the finish line.’” 

What might the finish line look like? CBS News reports that Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu's minister of finance, “told a conference on Jewish settlement in the Israeli occupied West Bank that Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to the south, to humanitarian zones without Hamas or terrorism, and from there they will start to leave, in great numbers, for third countries.” Admittedly, he's just the finance minister. Who else agrees with him? CBS writes, he said he would push for the plan’s completion, until Hamas is defeated, Gaza is fully occupied and Trump's historical plan is implemented with Gaza refugees resettled in other countries.” 

Back on the front of the Times, there's another look at the complete breakdown of privacy for clinicians and patients with the Veterans Administration as the Trump administration's termination of federal work from home in an overall effort to demoralize and drive out federal workers as required them to come to a workplace that's not actually set up for them to do their work. Same goes for pretty much everyone in back to office schemes, but it really jumps out when what someone's doing at the office is asking someone else about their suicidal ideation in a crowded open plan room. 

And in the middle of the page, Dateline Paris, “‘Made in America’ Becomes Trade War Casualty / Europeans Shun Goods in What Could Be a Long-Term Shift.”

“For motorcycle lovers in Sweden,” the Times writes, “Harley Davidson is the hottest brand on the road. Jack Daniel's whiskey beckons from the bar at British pubs. In France, Levi's jeans are all about chic. But in the tumult of President Trump's trade war with Europe, many European consumers are starting to avoid U.S. products and services in what appears to be a decisive and potentially long-term shift away from buying American, according to a new assessment by the European Central Bank. The study,” the Times writes, after the jump, which is to say, off on a web page, “found that even if a mere 5 % tax was placed on American products sold in Europe, Europeans would be inclined to shun them. What is new, the central bank said, is a preference among European consumers to move away from US products and brands altogether, no matter what the cost. That was the case even for households that could bear the brunt of higher prices.” This story keeps circling back to Tesla but nobody wants to buy Teslas anywhere, and it ends on an equivocal note with the chief executive of McDonald's publicly citing the risk of anti-Americanism. But the Times then reporting, “McDonald's brand does not seem to have been damaged yet. Same store sales in Canada and Europe were down only 1 % in the first quarter from a year earlier. But there is an 8 to 10 point increase in anti-American sentiment, he said.” Okay, but eating a place and eating there anyway is kind of the backbone of the American fast food industry. 

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 Mack Socca-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, whether the Times Delivery finds the stoop or not, we will talk again tomorrow.