Good morning. It is July 22nd. It is a gorgeously cool morning in New York City. Not merely less hot, but fully and comprehensively pleasant so far. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

For real, we're gonna try to keep it concise for time constraints this morning, even as this warning threatens to evolve into a bit that I deliver on the way into an extra long episode, but no, really, let's try it. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead spot, two columns wide, comes under the NEWS ANALYSIS heading. The headline is, “Trump’s Deflections Ease Base’s Fury Over Epstein / Other Grievances Reunify Allies for Now” The Times writes, “in the week after the Justice Department walked back its promise to release the full collection of files about the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein,” side note here, the evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a “financier” in any normal sense of the term remains remarkably thin, but since nobody has ever really pinned down what the underpinnings of his fortune were, it's just evolved into part of the boilerplate. “In the week after the Justice Department backed away from putting out the Epstein files,” it seemed there was nothing President Trump could do to quell the fury of some of his supporters.”

“He tried to coax them as he defended his attorney general against their wrath, asking ‘What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’” He said he did not understand their interest in the case, downplaying it as ‘boring.’ He even castigated them as ‘weaklings’ and disavowed them as ‘PAST supporters.’”  the Times writes, “Still, the backlash kept building. But,” the Times writes, “when the Wall Street Journal published a story detailing a decades-old letter with a lewd drawing that Mr. Trump allegedly sent Mr. Epstein for his birthday, Mr. Trump got a respite from the revolt as some of his core supporters rushed to his defense. Mr. Trump turned one of the most fractious moments for his base,” the Times writes, into one of the most unifying by tapping into other MAGA grievances: the deep mistrust of mainstream media, the disdain for Rupert Murdoch, and the belief that the president had been unfairly persecuted by his political foes.” That is, for all the confident, omniscient, journalistic voice in which it's delivered, a pretty extraordinary claim that Donald Trump was in unusually deep trouble with his own supporters over his inability to satisfy them on their questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, but that the revelation of even more evidence of his deep friendly ties to Epstein not only eased the crisis, but reversed it, turning it into one of the most unifying moments for his supporters. Extraordinary claims, as the maxim goes, require extraordinary evidence. So what evidence does the New York Times offer to show that millions of very angry people who had been unwilling to give their own beloved president the benefit of the doubt, suddenly turned on a dime. Well, before the story even gets to providing any quotes, while it's still in the paraphrasing stage, it starts backing away from its own thesis as vigorously as Trump backed away from releasing the Epstein files. Two paragraphs after asserting that this is one of the most unifying moments for the MAGA base, what the Times writes is, “Mr. Trump's allies in the hard right, make America great again movement, known as MAGA.” Weirdly, the piece has already used the name MAGA without explaining the acronym. But copy questions aside, “Mr. Trump's MAGA allies said that the discontent that had divided the base had dissipated but had not been eliminated, at least for now.” That's rather a different claim than the one that the base is in a state of peak unity. But what is the sourcing for even this much more cautious claim? “Stephen K. Bannon,” the Times writes, “a former White House adviser to Mr. Trump and influential leader of the MAGA base, said that the dynamics were shifting in part because the reporting in the story seemed ‘phony’ and because the paper decided not to show Mr. Trump a copy of the letter.”

“’The Murdoch's bizarre assault on the president galvanized his base because of both content and process,’ Mr. Bannon said. ‘Now we are united as Trump goes on offense against the Murdochs, the courts and the deep state.’” 

Now let's turn over to Slate where my old colleague Ben Mathis-Lilley read this same story and a selection of others that likewise asserted that the news that Trump had reportedly sent a coy and friendly letter to Jeffrey Epstein full of cryptic references and decorated with a lewd drawing had ended the concerns that the Epstein conspiracist wing of the MAGA movement had about the president and noticed a pattern. After quoting the Times, he wrote, The Washintgon Post cited "Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former adviser who hosts a daily talk show popular with Trump’s MAGA supporters," who told the paper that "MAGA is now united, because they can see there’s a common enemy," which he described as "the Deep State, with their media partners, led by Murdoch."

“CNN,” he continued, cited a certain Steve Bannon, “identifying him as a leader of the MAGA movement. ‘We are finally on offense,’ Bannon, Trump's former aide and a leader of the MAGA movement said via text message to CNN. President Trump has had enough and is fighting back against his real enemies.’ Politico cited and reprinted the quote that Bannon gave to the Washington Post.”

As Ben notes, Steve Bannon has a pretty clear vested interest in maintaining the viability of Donald Trump's political career. If anything, in this situation, Steve Bannon functions as a presidential spokesperson, not representing the opinions of the rank-and-file supporters of the president, but desperately trying to shape them by, among other things, trying to cast the Murdoch family. That is, the Murdochs who run Fox News, as known deep state adversaries of Trump. But the Times is not basing its assessment of the mood of the MAGA millions simply on the word of one self-interested close ally of the president. The story then moves on to cite Vice President J.D. Vance, Elon Musk and Laura Loomer. When this story moves even slightly beyond the current or former members of Donald Trump's innermost circle, it gets rather different results. “Natalie Winters, a correspondent for Mr. Bannon's podcast, War Room, said the news story made her feel gaslit,” the Times writes, well after the jump. “‘I thought the DOJ had nothing related to Epstein,’ she told Mr. Bannon on a recent episode. ‘Well, this story sort of contradicts that. So why don't we release it? It's maddening.’”

“Mike Benz,” the Times continues, “the executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, a group that opposes speech censorship on digital platforms, recalled on Mr. Bannon's show over the weekend how Mr. Trump in 2015 referred to former president Bill Clinton possibly being implicated in the files, helping give rise to the MAGA movement.” The Times writes, “expressed exasperation at the idea that you would just snap that shut.” These are Steve Bannon's own guests, telling him on his program  that they're still upset about the Epstein question. And then Bannon turns around and tells the Times and everyone else that the movement is rallying around the president and the Times prints it. That's literally the opposite of news analysis. It's a press release from the permanent campaign. Whoops, there went Concision. 

Okay, the rest of the front page. “Ukraine, Needing Arms, Moves to Make Its Own / But That Self-Reliance Still Requires Money From Its Allies.” That's underneath a picture of people sheltering from a Russian attack in a subway station in Kiev. 

Below that picture on the far left side of the page is another NEWS ANALYSIS piece. “Aid Disarray Rends Gaza / Critics say Israel Left a Vacuum in Power.” A story in which the deliberate starvation of Gaza, the serial mass killings by Israeli forces of civilians trying to get food aid and the overall project of rendering Gaza uninhabitable and ungovernable are treated as the unfortunate effects of Israeli carelessness, of what the Times calls “Israel's failure to plan for a power transition in Gaza” or elsewhere, in all but the same words “a failure by Israel to make detailed plans for a transition of power in Gaza. Israel,” the Times writes, “has devastated much of the territory, destroyed much of its infrastructure, decimated Hamas's leadership, and hindered its ability to provide social services and law enforcement in most of the territory. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel,” the Times continues, “has also repeatedly decided against creating a system of transitional governance, whether through formal military occupation or the empowerment of Palestinian alternatives to Hamas. In particular, he has prevented the return of the Palestinian Authority, which governed the territory until Hamas seized power in 2007.” Right, that's not the absence of a plan. That's the plan. “Compounding the situation,” the Times writes, “Israeli soldiers are repeatedly using live fire to contain unrest instead of using non-lethal forms of crowd control.” That assertion, too, gets repeated later on, as the Times describes desperate jostling among Palestinians forced to travel miles to get their hands on any food at all. Then writes “to quell the turmoil Israeli soldiers have regularly fired on the crowds instead of using non-lethal methods.” It doesn't seem like trying to contain unrest or quell the turmoil Is what they're doing. Certainly, they haven't accomplished those goals. What they've accomplished and what they've done by opening fire into crowds, is opening fire into crowds, and killing people by the dozens. Policy is what you do. So the problem is not an absence of policy. 

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 Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Keep sending those along if you are able.

Tomorrow's schedule is going to be tricky, but if nothing too unexpected gets in the way, we should surely be able to talk, on Thursday, at least.