Good morning. It is August 20th. It is cloudy, cool, and extremely humid in New York City. So humid that it's supposed to start coming down as rain eventually. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Today's look at the Morning New York Times is going to start not on the front page, but inside the paper, deep inside the paper, on page A21, where the headline is, “At Hampton's Event, Cuomo Predicts Help from Trump is on the Way.” 

Now, yesterday's newsletter, for paid subscribers, was all about the decisions the New York Times has been making about news coverage and placement in the mayoral race, and specifically about newsroom leadership's transparent desire to stick it to the Democratic nominee and frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, even if that means grotesquely misrepresenting the fundamental susceptibility to scandal of Mamdani and his opponents. Last week, it was front-page news that Cuomo attacked Mamdani for living in a rent-stabilized apartment. Today, it is sort of news, but buried in the paper, that Cuomo is playing footsie with Donald Trump. 

“Former governor Andrew Cuomo,” the paper writes, “told donors at a private fundraiser in the Hamptons last weekend that he believed President Trump would wade into the race for New York City mayor and help clear a path for his election, according to audio obtained by Politico.” So to be perfectly fair to the New York Times, some part of the reason why this incredibly damaging story about an important local politician in a major political contest is not receiving more prominent play is that the Times was beaten to the story by a competing outlet, and so the Times’s institutional desire to tilt the playing field against Mamdani harmonizes with its institutional desire to give as little credit to other people's scoops as it can get away with. 

The story continues “Mr. Cuomo, who is running as an independent in the general election after losing June's Democratic primary made the comments on Saturday as he sought to convince Trump-friendly donors that he was best positioned in the crowded field of candidates to defeat Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, his party's leftist nominee. The text of the news is incredibly damning for Cuomo, presenting yet another story of his inherent treacherousness and bone-deep lack of commitment to the Democratic Party, to which he owes his entire nepotistic career. Having been roundly rejected by the city's Democratic voters, he is reportedly trying to make the case that the anti-Mamdani vote should congeal around him in a coalition that would combine whatever is left of his own personal fan base with whatever is left of the support for the terminally damaged, corrupt incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, and all the Republicans whose party nomination went to the Guardian Angel talk show host and cat hoarder Curtis Sliwa. 

“‘I think we can minimize his vote because he'll never be a serious candidate,’ Mr. Cuomo said of Mr. Sliwa, according to Politico, ‘and Trump himself, as well as top Republicans, will say the goal is to stop Mamdani and you'll be wasting your vote on Sliwa.’” Later on, the Times writes, “in public appearances, Mr. Cuomo has sought to portray himself as the only candidate capable of going head to head with Mr. Trump, whose administration he has said is trying to undermine our democracy but he has used a different tone behind closed doors. Earlier this month, he told business leaders that, personally, neither he nor Mr. Trump wanted a fight with the other.” 

But that is all that is. It's important not to overlook the context of this story, namely the word “Hamptons,” which keeps cropping up in the stories about Andrew Cuomo's various efforts to find a new path to the mayorship of New York City, which is not in the Hamptons.

The fact that Andrew Cuomo, whose own residency in New York City is extremely tenuous and recent, even by the most charitable accounts, is trying to recover his standing by pounding away on the Hamptons fundraiser circuit, could be an embarrassing front page story in its own right. It just emphasizes that the anti-Mamdani movement, such as it is, basically represents the desires of a bunch of jerks who want to rule the city from afar, and of the people who operate the New York Times. 

On the front of the paper, the lead news spot is a two-column headline over two separate columns of writing. “Trump Rejects Sending U.S. Troops to Ukraine As Part of a Peace Deal.” On the left is NEWS ANALYSIS. “The Only Clarity on
Putin: Ambiguity.” And on the right, “Suggests Air Support for Europeans on the Ground.”

The package is a well-meaning but ultimately fruitless attempt to try to impose orderly meaning on an essentially meaningless situation. The left-hand story begins, “In the annals of transatlantic diplomacy, Monday's meeting between President Trump and European leaders may go down as one of the stranger summits in memory. Historic, yet uncertain in its outcome, momentous, yet ephemeral in its effect on the war in Ukraine, choreographed, yet hostage to the impulses of a single man, Mr. Trump.

“As Europe's leaders,” the Times continues, “began returning to their slumbering capitals, diplomats and foreign policy experts struggled to make sense of a midsummer's meeting with Mr. Trump and President Vladimir Zelensky that often had a dreamlike quality, with made-for-TV moments and unexpected interludes. The seven European leaders put forward a show of support for Mr. Zelensky and unity with one another. They won a potentially vital, if vague, expression of support from Mr. Trump for post-war security guarantees for Ukraine and sidestepped a discussion of territorial concessions, according to Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany. Still, they all but acquiesced to Mr. Trump's abandonment of a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine as a condition for further talks. Analysts said that put Europe's leaders essentially where they were before Mr. Trump's meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Alaska last week, subject to the president's faith that he can conjure a deal with the Russian leader to end the grinding war.” 

The top of the adjoining story says, “Trump said on Tuesday that no American ground troops would be sent to Ukraine as part of a potential peace agreement with Russia. A day after a round of intense diplomacy in Washington yielded few details on how to stop the war and prevent future Russian aggression.” 

Few details. A vague expression of support. Maybe they should have made the headline three columns wide and added a piece about how Trump couldn't keep track of who was sitting at the table with him during the summit. Nobody can tell what the president is doing because the president doesn't know what he's doing. 

The rest of the top of the page is a picture of people looking out a bus window at a bunch of feds with a handcuffed person on the streets of Washington, DC, to go with a brutally incoherent and unfocused story. “Pulling the ‘Crime Card’ Proves Politically Dicey / Left Walks Into a Trap That the Right Has Found Familiar.” 

This is like a mix of that story they ran yesterday, asserting that crime is a very powerful issue for Republicans, regardless of the facts about crime, with the observation that Democrats decry mass murders whenever they happen, even though, as the story says, “mass shootings make up a tiny portion of gun crimes, and recent data from the Gun Violence Archive show that such shootings are falling nearly to pre-pandemic levels.” The idea, such as it is, is that appealing to statistical reality doesn't really work no matter which party does it. 

The Times writes, “polling shows that Americans believe that crime is getting worse, even when it is getting better. ‘That is not simply because the public is easily swayed by social media posts and crime-saturated local news,’ said Adam Gelb, the president and chief executive of the Council on Criminal Justice, a policy think tank. There are other factors, like how brazen is the crime? How random? How brutal? A shooting during a Fourth of July parade or a Super Bowl victory celebration feels far more threatening than one on a street corner in the dead of night.” 

Okay, but no. Almost all of those considerations, the brazenness of the crime, the brutality, the unexpectedness of the timing or location, are things that people receive from social media posts and crime-saturated local news. The crime issue in American politics and discourse is a mediated phenomenon. What most people are worried about is not their personal experience, but all the terrible things they're hearing about. That is literally, directly, definitionally the reason that people believe crime is worse, even as the crime numbers and the opportunities to have a firsthand experience of crime on which to base your judgment go down. 

And speaking of the power of propaganda, above that story on the jump page is an even more damaged and addled piece of work, “Immigration enforcement takes key role in crackdown on crime in DC.” Right there. The headline is already a disaster. “Immigration enforcement” and a “crackdown on crime” are two separate categories. The one can't take a key role in the other without Fundamentally changing the nature of what the other is. Meanwhile, granting that there is a crackdown on crime going on is itself a fatally inaccurate assessment of the events in question. 

Here to you, the Times is back to the problem it had with the Ukraine coverage, which is that the president's actions cannot be fit into a rational account of the world on the terms that the president offers. “Many working class immigrants who operate the hotels, restaurants and tourist sites of Washington, D.C.,” the Times writes, “say they had long wanted the city to do something about homelessness and crime.” 

Homelessness, now we're in a third category. “Some said they had watched violence intensify on the very streets where they work overnight shifts or walk on early mornings as they open up shops. But in recent days, workers, small business owners and street vendors say they have found themselves at the center of two crackdowns, one on crime, another on illegal immigration. With immigration and customs enforcement agents appearing alongside National Guard members and federal agents as part of the Trump administration's crackdown on crime in Washington, these workers say they worry that the federal show of force may only complicate efforts to lower violence in the city.” 

I don't even have it in me to try to unpack that sentence. It's just gibberish. And from there, the story moves on to absurdity. The Times writes, “some said they worried that the result could be the opposite of the president's intended goals. Fracturing relationships between immigrants and local authorities, deterring immigrants from reporting crimes, and in the end, making the city less safe.” 

The president's intended goals? The president's intended goals are to drive out the immigrants who he says are poisoning America's bloodstream. Those are the president's goals. He wants to fracture relationships between immigrants and local authorities. He wants to exclude immigrants from the protection of the law and he wants their lives to be less safe. That's what he ran on. That's what he's doing. 

If you're sending reporters out to cover what's happening in Washington, DC, and you still come away with a story that talks straight-facedly about the president's desire to crack down on crime, you are really screwing up the basics of your job. 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. Continue sending those along if you can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.