Good morning. It is the 13th of May. It is cloudy in New York City and humid. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The lead story on the front of the delivery edition of the New York Times is yesterday's transient repositioning of Donald Trump's China tariff policy. “CHINA AND U.S. SET TO LOWER TARIFFS TO EASE TENSIONS / AGREEMENT OF 90 DAYS / White House Backs Off Steepest Fees, Seeing Risks to Growth.” After introducing the news, the Times writes, “the outcome of the frenzied negotiations brought tariff rates close to where they were before Mr. Trump ratcheted them higher on April 2nd, which he billed as ‘Liberation Day.’ However, the talks did not appear to yield any meaningful concessions beyond an agreement to continue discussions.”

That was enough to send the markets bouncing up yesterday to a higher plateau as investors successfully, for the moment, bet on other investors, betting that Trump would come around to doing something that would goose investor enthusiasm. Speaking of the meme stock presidency or the meme asset presidency, next to that, a bit lower down, the story is “Trump Crypto Auction Sells White House Access / Investors From Around the World Rush to Expand Holdings,” and that includes a chart showing the price of the meme coin whose name I still don't know how to pronounce. So I'm just going to be calling it “dollar sign Trump” since it went on the market after its huge initial spike of money pumped straight into the Trump family's pockets and its almost as rapid decline wiping out most of the people who had put their money in the Trump family's pockets. Then a series of smaller spikes created by Trump either buying coins or talking about the coins, each one recording what would have been a lucrative pump and dump opportunity for anyone who might have known that good news was coming. “In a matter of weeks,” the Times writes “the Trumps and their partners have reeled in more than $1.3 million in fees, taking a cut every time the coins changed hands. According to Chainalysis, a crypto data firm, Trump's ongoing auction of the coins with a White House tour and dinner with him as a prize for the biggest investors, has,” the Times writes, “set off a spectacle that has drawn bipartisan criticism, triggered a suspicious trading pattern, and left a sitting United States president wide open to attempts to corruptly influence him.” 

Eric Lipton, one of the reporters on the piece, managed to get himself in a mess on social media by marking the publication of it online with a series of scoldy tweets declaring that this is not the Russia hoax, which he put scare quotes on, and holding forth on how this is supposedly not corruption, until a quid pro quo takes place, which was simply wrong, an attempt to read the Supreme Court's bizarre and destructive interpretation of a bribery statute into some larger lesson about what corruption is and isn't. That's certainly not the standard that the New York Times applies to whether its employees or contractors, for that matter, may take favors but it's also weirdly crosswise to the piece, which argues only that the president is wide open to attempts to corruptly influence him. And yet there's the story in the paper, because it is extremely newsworthy, because it is extremely corrupt. 

Next to that, the headline is “Trump Expects Saudis to Pour Cash Into U.S.” Dateline Riyadh. “President Trump embarks on a visit to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday with a one trillion dollar wish list for investments in the United States, a sum equivalent to the kingdom's entire gross domestic product last year. The Saudi crown prince,” the Times continues, “is offering $600 billion during Mr. Trump's presidency. Neither figure is realistic, economists say.” After the jump, a former mission chief to Saudi Arabia for the International Monetary Fund tells the Times, the leaders are two guys who like throwing very large numbers around, “Mr. Trump and the Saudi Crown Prince,” the Times writes, “both have a penchant for eye-popping declarations, leaving questions about feasibility for their underlings to sort out.” A little later comes another part about what the allure of the trip may be to Trump. “His state visit to Saudi Arabia this week,” the Times writes, “is expected to be a spectacular affair full of pageantry that contrasts sharply to President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s relatively chilly visit to the kingdom in 2022. During Mr. Trump's first Saudi state visit, he was welcomed with a traditional sword dance and an image of his face projected onto the facade of the lavish Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh, the capital.” 

And right below that, on the jump page, A7, is a NEWS ANALYSIS piece with one, two, three, four, five bylines on it, which seems like a strange use of the rubric. The headline is, “A Tour Vague on Diplomacy, but all about the art of the deal. As a branding exercise,” the story says “it makes perfect sense. Surrounded by resource-rich royals and American business executives, Mr. Trump, who likes to brag about his deal-making skills, will scrawl his sharpie over term sheets and lots of them. He will visit palaces, walk on red carpets, and be treated like a king in a region that is increasingly vital to the Trump family's financial interests. Yet, as a strategic exercise, the trip's purpose remains foggy.” 

Later on, the piece says, “in place of grand strategy, will be a series of financial transactions that Mr. Trump will promote as producing jobs for American workers. The agenda conveniently aligns with Mr. Trump's expanding business plans. His family has six pending deals with a majority Saudi-owned real estate firm, a cryptocurrency deal with an affiliate of the government of the United Arab Emirates, and a new golf and luxury villa product backed by the government of Qatar.” Then comes mention of the bribe plane. Later on, the story cites Trump telling Bob Woodward that he saved Mohammed bin Salman's ass by making the congressional hubbub over bin Salman's decision to murder Jamal Khashoggi of the Washington Post and chop his body up with a bone saw go away, and it recalls how the Saudi sovereign wealth fund gave Jared Kushner two billion dollars to play with, after Trump's first term was over, and how Trump used the Saudis upstart professional golf tour to enrich his own golf courses and hotels, and it brings up the real estate and crypto deals on top of that. It's a very nice roundup, but it's not clear why it should be a news analysis piece instead of just being inserted as standard boilerplate into every story about the president's Middle Eastern dealings. 

The big picture at the top of the page and the left-hand news column are about the release of the last American hostage in Gaza, Eden Alexander, who was also, though the story took a little longer to get to it, one of the Israeli military hostages in Gaza, as he moved to Israel after high school, the Times writes, to join the military. The other questions about national identification and ownership of the situation come up a little bit later. “Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister,” the Times writes, “said in a statement on Monday that Mr. Alexander's release showed the benefits of placing Hamas under greater military pressure. But,” the Times writes after that, “critics of Mr. Netanyahu strategy have said Mr. Alexander's release instead highlighted the failure of such an approach since he was being released mainly because of US pressure rather than Israeli action.”

Down below that on the jump page, speaking of positive spin on negative results, the headline is “Why 30 days of US strikes prompted Trump to declare victory over the Houthis”. The answer being that it's because those 30 days of airstrikes were an abject failure and a ridiculous waste of money and armaments. “The United States,” the Times writes, “had not even established air superiority over the Houthis. Instead, what was emerging after 30 days of a stepped up campaign against the Yemeni group was another expensive but inconclusive American military engagement in the region. The Houthis shot down several American MQ-9 Reaper drones and continued to fire at naval ships in the Red Sea, including an American aircraft carrier, and the US strikes burned through weapons and munitions at a rate of about $1 billion in the first month alone. It did not help that two $67 million FAA-18 Super Hornets from America's flagship aircraft carrier tasked with conducting strikes against the Houthis accidentally tumbled off the carrier into the sea.” 

Down in the lower left of page one, it’s “Staffing Shortage Adds to Newark Airport Woes / F.A.A. Advisories Delay
Most Arriving Flights.” 

“Most flights destined for New York,” the Times writes, “were being delayed at their origin airports by more than one hour, 40 minutes, at midday on Monday because too few air traffic controllers were available. Public service announcement for travelers trying to use the United Hub. United's promise that you can switch to a different airport without incurring any additional charges on the ticket you bought is only as good as United's customer service operations, which is to say, not good at all.

On page A6, Kier Starmer, the newest and most vigorous entrant in the ongoing competition to see who can do the most pathetic possible job as prime minister of Great Britain, gave a nasty anti-immigration speech yesterday. “Starmer promises to rein in immigration to Britain” is the headline. “A hardening stance reflects the return of a hot button issue. In a speech from Downing Street, the Times writes, “Mr. Starmer, who leads the governing Labour Party, accused his predecessors of allowing immigration to run out of control and effectively creating an experiment with open borders. ‘Today, this Labour government is shutting down the lab. The experiment is over. We are taking back control of our borders,’ he said, adopting the slogan used by pro-Brexit campaigners ahead of Britain's referendum on leaving the European Union in 2016. Without his new measures, Mr. Starmer added, ‘we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.’” Someone somewhere referred to him as “eunuch Powell” for that, which seems exactly correct. The goal here is to fight off Nigel Farage's racist reform party by assuring voters that labor can be even more racist. After quoting Starmer writing on social media, “if you want to live in the UK, you should speak English. That's common sense.” The Times writes, “but some critics argue that the approach could validate Mr. Farage's right-wing populist agenda and fuel prejudice.” Is that even an argument? Seems more like an incredibly simple basic premise. 

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