Good morning. It is May 12th. It is a bright, sunny, dry morning in New York City. The last one for a while, according to the forecast, which has a soggy future laid out before us. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The Trump administration and China announced a temporary agreement that would turn the apocalyptic Chinese front of Trump's trade war into something merely incredibly painful and restrictive for the next 90 days. Bloomberg reports that the 145 % set of tariffs that Trump was imposing will be cut to 30%, while the 125 % retaliatory Chinese tariffs will go down to 10%. None of that will do anything about all the cargo that would have been crossing the Pacific right now and is not. Nor, according to Reuters, does the agreement for a temporary reduction in trade hostilities include the U.S. restoring the de minimis exemption for small packages, that was the foundation of the entire cheap online commerce business. But, the markets are all bouncing up on the news that the U.S. seems to have bought a three-month reprieve from the senile president obliterating trade.

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the operational tempo of the Times on the weekends being what it is, the lead news spot belongs to “Tide of Consensus Swept Quiet American to Papacy / Cardinals at Conclave Describe How a Man Many Didn’t Know Grew in Favor.” Basically, Pope Francis had set up the College of Cardinals so that there was no room for any right winger to build support. The Vatican Secretary of State as default frontrunner Evidently came across as a default frontrunner and that left space for a powerful well-connected, reasonably well-liked American and leader across the entire Americas to collect, while he avoided” the Times writes “any obvious politicking or machinations a degree of support that quickly made him unbeatable.” 

Anyway, that was two columns wide while yesterday's genuinely hottest news story goes to the left side of the page down below a picture at the top of a damaged house in Kashmir, the headline is “Qatar Is Said To Give Trump
Official Plane,” with a Maggie Haberman, Eric Schmidt, Glenn Thrush, triple byline, “The Trump administration,” the Times writes “plans to accept a luxury Boeing 747-8 plane as a donation from the Qatari royal family that will be upgraded to serve as Air Force One, which would make it one of the biggest foreign gifts ever received by the U.S. government, several American officials with knowledge of the matter said. The plane would then be donated to President Trump's presidential library when he leaves office, two senior officials said. Such a gift raises the possibility that Mr. Trump would have use of the plane even after his presidency ends.” Going to jump ahead and do a quick count of paragraphs. One, two, three, in the jump, four, five, sixth paragraph. “ABC News reported Sunday morning that the gift of the plane was to be announced in the coming days as Mr. Trump made the first extended foreign trip of his presidency to three nations in the Middle East, including Qatar.” For the Times, a five paragraph wait before credit goes to the news organization that actually broke an immense scoop is not bad. Back up to the top of the story. “While a Qatari official described the proposal as still under discussion, and the White House said that gifts it accepted would be done in full compliance with the law, Democratic lawmakers and good government groups expressed outrage over the substantial ethical issues the plan presented. They cited the intersection of Mr. Trump's official duties with his business interests in the Middle East, the immense value of the lavishly appointed plane, and the assumption that Mr. Trump would have use of it after leaving office. Sold new, a commercial Boeing 747-8 costs in the range of $400 million. This is,” the story explains, partly a result of Donald Trump's ongoing temper tantrum about the fact that the two jets now being used as Air Force One are, as the Times writes, “more than 30 years old and need frequent servicing, sometimes taking months.” Boeing has been working on replacing those planes since before Trump was elected the first time. Mr. Trump, the Times writes, “renegotiated the contract for the planes in his first term and has wanted to fly on them while in office now.”The Times is trying to do its best with this story, but the constraints of its theory of itself as a newspaper of record mean that it has to spend lots of time laying out and then critic-testing the various procedural theories by which the Trump administration proposes to make an explicitly unconstitutional flagrant act of bribery somehow supposedly achievable.

“One person,” who the Times describes as “having knowledge of the effort to acquire the plane, said,” the Times writes, “that the Qataris had initially discussed donating it immediately to the Trump library and Mr. Trump would then use it while in office. But, government lawyers said that would violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution, the person said, which prohibits federal officials from accepting financial benefits from foreign governments without congressional approval.” So the Trump team's theory is that if they route the transaction through the Defense Department, on the way to the Trump presidential library, that's going to magically change the nature of the gift. This is beneath contempt, but last time around, for fear of antagonizing a sitting president, the Supreme Court basically ruled that it wasn't going to enforce the emoluments clause against Donald Trump for, among other things, getting foreign delegations to stay at his Washington, D.C. hotel. And so they gave him a legal opening that he believes is wide enough to drive a luxury jumbo jet through. 

Down below that on page one, the headline is, “To Scientists, a Medical Marvel. Foes See a Dangerous Weapon.” 

“To scientists who study it,” The Times writes, “mRNA is a miracle molecule. The
vaccines that harnessed it against Covid saved an estimated 20 million lives, a rapid development that was recognized with a Nobel Prize. Clinical trials show mRNAbased vaccines increasing survival in patients with pancreatic and other deadly cancers. Biotechnology companies are investing in the promise of mRNA therapies to treat and even cure a host of genetic and chronic diseases, including type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis. But to some state legislators, mRNA therapies are weapons of mass destruction and a public health threat. They argue that these vaccines are untested and unsafe, and will be pumped into the food supply to mass-medicate Americans against their will. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation's top health official, has falsely called the mRNA shots against COVID the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Here is pretty much the perfect demonstration of the idiocy and fundamental dishonesty of the sort of two-sided reporting and news writing that the Times considers the hallmark of objective professionalism. There is no “debate” between scientists and state legislators, and the secretary of health and human services, about mRNA vaccines. You don't need to say “to scientists who study it, mRNA is a miracle molecule.” The results are in. mRNA technology produced effective COVID vaccines with unprecedented swiftness. The trial results from other applications are incredibly promising. mRNA vaccines are a hugely important medical breakthrough that has already happened. Now a bunch of fanatical cranks are trying to destroy that breakthrough. 

This is only about “dueling perspectives” in the same sense that New York City and Al-Qaeda had different ideas about the best use for the World Trade Center. 

Facing the jump page from that story and neatly tucked below the story of the president's dreams of a luxury airplane, the headline is “Duffy warns that outages at airports may continue.” Yesterday morning, Newark airport had its third air traffic control outage since Sean Duffy became the transportation secretary. And since Elon Musk started slashing the FAA's operating budget. So, Duffy went on TV and blamed the ongoing unraveling of air safety under the Trump administration on antiquated equipment. They're basically using shock doctrine, or what the Philadelphia 76ers referred to as “the process” in aviation safety, to say nothing of across the rest of the federal government, creating failure so that somewhere down the line after everything has been broken, it will be necessary to replace everything with new systems of their own devising. 

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. Keep sending those in if you're able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.