Good morning. It is May 9th. It is a dark, rainy Friday morning in New York City with a chance of more showers going off and on all day. There's a busy day's work lined up and last week's cold is trying to stage a comeback. So we're going to do this one fast. This is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The news continues to pile up at such a frantic pace that when I first laid unfocused eyes on the upside-down front of this morning's New York Times, I couldn't recollect for a moment why there would be a giant headline spanning the whole top of the front page. But the answer in sentence case, centered with a lot of white space around it, is “An American Pope / Leo XIV, of Chicago, Took Global Path to Top of Church.”

We'll circle back to that and the print newspaper in a moment, but there's already more breaking news this morning. David Souter, the last Supreme Court justice to have been appointed by a Republican president without operating as a partisan Republican stooge, died yesterday at the age of 85. After being nominated by George H.W. Bush in 1990, he refused the opportunity in 2000 to join the more partisan Republicans on the court  in stealing the election for George W. Bush. He famously ate an apple every day, core and all, and he timed his retirement to make sure that a Republican president would not fill his seat. They genuinely don't make them like that anymore. In large part because Souter’s independence inspired the conservative movement to assemble an extremely elaborate and expensive machine for manufacturing a totally different kind of Supreme Court justice. 

Also in this morning's news, President Donald Trump has asserted that he has the power to fire the Librarian of Congress and is trying to do so. The Trump administration is also preparing to activate the remains of the immigration and asylum system that it is otherwise strenuously trying to destroy to bring in a batch of Afrikaners from South Africa next week because the administration is shamelessly racist and segregationist and it sees in the Boers kindred spirits. The Times, NPR and Reuters are all describing these Afrikaner migrants as refugees in their headlines, accepting the administration's laundering of neo-Nazi propaganda about how the former overlords of apartheid are being victimized by living under a system of majority rule. 

The Associated Press is reporting that Pete Hegseth, with the permission of the Supreme Court granted through its shadow docket earlier this week, is setting about forcing a thousand or so trans service members to leave the military, while the question of whether he's ultimately allowed to do that is working its way through the courts. The AP writes, “‘no more pronouns,’ he told a special operations forces conference in Tampa. ‘No more dudes in dresses. We're done with that shit.’ Department officials,” the AP writes, “have said it's difficult to determine exactly how many transgender service members there are, but medical records will show those who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, who show symptoms or are being treated.” 

And in one last piece of breaking news this morning, unless something else happens, the president of the United States did something about the fundamental terms of the all-out trade war that he unilaterally declared on China. Here are some headlines from various news outlets trying to process and explain it. 

CNBC has “Trump suggests cutting China tariff rate to still high 80 percent ahead of Switzerland talks.” 
The BBC has “Trump hints tariffs on China may drop as talks set to begin.” 
Business Insider, “Trump makes the first move ahead of tariff talks with China.” 
CNN has “Trump, in a major concession, says the tariff on China should be 80%, but we'll leave it up to Bessent.” 
And the New York Times has “president signals he's open to slashing China tariffs.” 

What all of this hinting and signaling means is that Trump went on Truth Social and posted something. In a truly gorgeous case study in how the press feels obligated to translate the effusions of the elderly man in the Oval Office into something resembling a presidential policy statement. CNN writes, “in a series of posts on Truth Social, Trump appeared to lay out his demands and concessions for the meeting between U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, and their Chinese counterparts. Trump said China must import more U.S. goods and in return, he believes the United States should lower its 145 % tariff on most Chinese goods to 80%.” CNN then writes, “‘China should open up its market to USA would be so good for them. Closed markets don't work anymore.’ Trump posted.” That's all caps. Triple exclamation points after “them” and “anymore.” CNN then writes “’80 % tariff on China seems right, up to Scott B.’ Trump said in a separate post.” That one was in sentence case, give or take a little of Trump's erratic capitalization. “Up to Scott B.” That's what you have to work with if you're making decisions about your near and medium term participation in Trans-Pacific trade. 

Back to the print newspaper. Pope, Pope, Pope. Three full pages of Pope stuff inside the paper, but nothing on the New Orleans Times Picayune report that the First American Pope's maternal grandparents, before they moved north to the south side of Chicago, were recorded in the 1900 census as black. So far, what's been bubbling up from the American right wing is more upset about the fact that Leo XIV supports migrants and used his Twitter account to rebuke JD Vance for making bogus claims about the Christian duty to love the stranger.

Below the fold, there's a story about the breakdown of air traffic control at Newark airport and how the breakdown of radar and radio service for a minute and a half on April 28th has now produced a cascade of operational troubles as the controllers traumatized by working blind take trauma leave and stretch the already stretched system even thinner. 

Beside that is the story about how Ed Martin, quite possibly the most belligerent and unprofessional member of the Trump administration, which is a major accomplishment, will not be allowed to advance from being the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., to being the regular one after Republican Senator Tom Tillis openly declared that Martin's support for the January 6th attackers was unacceptable and that Tillis would not vote to advance him from committee. “It is possible,” the Times writes, “that Mr. Martin's fall signals a limit to what Senate Republicans, who have rubber-stamped Trump nominees, are willing to accept. Mr. Trump's approval ratings among key demographics have flagged in the past month, darkening the party's prospects in the 2026 midterms and perhaps loosening the grip of a president who will never again top its ticket.” You hope. Yet it is just as likely that Mr. Martin, a hyper-partisan activist with no experience as a prosecutor, known for consorting with anti-Semites and the far right fringe of his party, was simply more trouble than he was worth. “Mr. Martin,” the Times writes, “will be relatively easy to replace with a more palatable nominee who has a similar, if not quite as extreme, set of priorities, according to Republican aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy.” 

And then a little further down the column, “Mr. Trump said on Thursday that he would name the Fox News personality, Jeanine Pirro, whose false statements about the 2020 election were part of a lawsuit against the network to be the interim U.S. attorney for Washington.” Nice try by the anonymous Senate aides.

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 Socca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. If you like what you're hearing, do throw some money our way. Please and thank you. Enjoy your Mother's Day weekend, and if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we'll talk again on Monday.