Good morning. It is July 10th. It is a hot gray morning in New York City. Rain is supposed to be on the way, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

As before, we gotta go fast because the morning schedule is tight. Also, the air conditioner is off for the sake of sound quality. President Donald Trump yesterday announced that he intends to impose 50 % tariffs against Brazil to punish the country unless it drops the prosecution of his friend and ally Jair Bolsonaro for his Trump-style attempt to carry out a coup to overthrow the result of his own election defeat. Prosecutors say that Bolsonaro's effort included a plot to murder his opponent, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, with poison. In a letter to President Lula, Trump called Brazil's effort to punish an attempted violent overthrow of its government a “witch hunt,” the same term he uses to describe the United States' lukewarm and feeble attempts thwarted by the Supreme Court to hold him criminally accountable for his own deadly coup attempt. The letter demanded that the prosecution be dropped. That is to say, the president of the United States was invoking a tariff power that he legally doesn't have, in an attempt to extort a foreign country into allowing him to interfere in its criminal legal system and its politics. He wrote this down and sent it out under the letterhead of his office. In his first term, when he tried to do one part of that, or two parts, using an authority that he didn't really legally have, to extort a foreign government. He tried to dissemble about it, and cover it up, and it ended up being the offense that brought about his first impeachment. Now he's just doing it out in the open. And if you click down through three screens of the New York Times homepage to get to the fourth one, it reads one itty bitty headline down there. 

On the front of this morning's print edition of the New York Times, the lead news spot, two columns wide, is “Trump law imperils care for 1.5 million in New York. Cuts to health insurance beyond Medicaid will hit state harder than most.” It's about how New York, unlike most other states, took advantage of the Affordable Care Act to implement a federally funded insurance program that's now due to lose that federal funding. 

Next to that is a picture of the flood ravaged Guadalupe River over a map showing how the river valleys were inundated between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. on July 4th, killing more than 100 people. “Floodwaters moved faster than Niagara Falls,” is the caption. “The flow rate of the Guadalupe River quickly went from that of a small stream to a torrent of 120,000 cubic feet per second.” That points the reader to page A13, where there are more maps showing how the devastating waters moved downstream, accompanied by a news story saying that the death toll is now at 119 with 173 missing. 

And below that, the headline is “flooding kills three in fire scarred New Mexico.” Heavy rains fell on land that had been burned in wildfires the year before, which meant that the water just flowed on down as two different pieces of the climate disaster reinforced each other.

The page one piece of the Texas flooding story is, “In Texas Hill Country, rivers bring magnetic allure and danger. As area grows, risks of flooding do too.” 

Next to that, the headline right on the fold is, “Measles cases at high in US, raising alarm.” 

“There have now been more measles cases in 2025,” the Times writes, “than in any other year since the contagious virus was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000. According to new data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” That's certainly horrifying. I don't know that it “raises an alarm” given that the people who would respond to such an alarm are now under the authority of the Health and Human Services Secretary and Administration committed to the belief that the spread of diseases like measles is good. 

Speaking of right-wing lunatics, next to that, below the fold is a profile of Laura Loomer. Her plastic face slightly out of register, peering out at the reader. “Right-wing bullhorn has the only ear that matters. Through battles big and small since President Trump took office,” The Times writes, “one intense conflict stands out for the president's openness to once-fringe views and voices. It is the struggle by some of his aides to contain Laura Loomer. Ms. Loomer,” The Times writes, “the right-wing agitator whose proud Islamophobia and self-styled role as an ideological purity enforcer, have made her toxic to some members of Mr. Trump's inner circle, got the upper hand in late March. Her posts on X about several National Security Council aides she deemed insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump got his attention.” 

The story then recounts how he brought her in for a meeting with administration officials, during which he declared that he wanted the people she had targeted fired, and six of them were immediately. “Afterward,” the Times writes, “he dismissed the group and hugged Ms. Loomer on her way out.” The implications of that hug resurface after the jump when the Times writes that “she has filed a defamation lawsuit against the comedian Bill Maher and HBO for Mr. Maher's suggestion on his show last September that Ms. Loomer was sexually involved with Mr. Trump. ‘Just because a woman is able to get access to the president and she isn't a millionaire and doesn't work for the Republican Party, she must be sleeping with the president,’ she said in another interview. ‘I don't like using the term because I don't want to sound like a liberal, but there really is a lot of misogyny.” The Times then writes, “still,”—as a really loaded still—“Ms. Loomer acknowledges that the president is central to her life. ‘President Trump comes first. She says she has told her boyfriend. And if you can't handle that, then go find somebody else.’” 

The story also describes a failed attempt by Loomer to get into the VIP box with the president when he went to see Les Mis at the Kennedy Center and how amid her effusions about the administration's concentration camp in the Everglades, she appeared to call for exterminating the entire Hispanic population of the United States by feeding them to alligators. Oh wait, circling back to the front page from there, I just noticed that the Brazil story did make the print edition. It is a single column down the edge of page A9. 

Also tucked away inconspicuously inside the paper, although taking up more room, on page A22, is the headline “Self-identity surveys vex many who defy labeling.” This is the Times's second attempt to follow up on and justify its choice to write a story in collaboration with a racist hacker and a racist blogger using private personal material stolen in a mass hack of Columbia University's admission files to report that the current Democratic mayoral nominee in New York Zohran Mamdani had as a teenager used the ethnicity check boxes for Asian and for African-American or black writing in “Ugandan” on the latter to describe his Indian and Indian Ugandan background on his unsuccessful application for admission to Columbia. This story is designed to retroactively support the nonsensical claim by standards editor Patrick Healy, in defense of the original piece, that the Times was out to explore the complexities of ethnic self-identification, rather than simply to try to damage Mamdani's reputation by publishing a story that misleadingly framed his accurate self-representation of his ethnicity as a deceptive representation of his race, building on its own posture of detachment from a story that it itself actively manufactured. 

The print edition headline on the original story used the classic Times-ian formulation of saying that Mamdani's college application had “drawn scrutiny” when the story itself was the scrutiny. This story says, “last week, racial identity and box checking came up in New York after Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor who is of Indian heritage and was born in Uganda, confirmed to the Times that as a high school senior, he had identified himself on a Columbia University college application as Asian and Black or African American, and also wrote in Ugandan on the form.” It just “came up” all on its own. The disingenuousness of that approach is a fatal flaw in the piece, even on its own terms, by refusing to mention the underlying hack and leak to try to launder the story, the Times ignores the most newsworthy aspect of the question of how vexing it is for people to reduce their identities to a set of check boxes on a form. What could be more germane to that question than the live example of what happens when someone steals the identity information you've provided someone out of its original context and interprets it in bad faith as a weapon against you? 

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 along if you can. The podcast is going to take another break, this time for vacation. But if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again the Monday after next.