Good morning. It is September 3rd. It is a sunny morning in New York and still not too hot for the very last day of school children's summer vacation, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

In a news conference yesterday, President Donald Trump announced that United States special forces killed 11 people in an unprovoked attack on a boat in the Caribbean in what was by the administration's own account, an extrajudicial murder. The morning New York Times puts the news of the incident in a single column on page A7. Eleven “terrorists,” in quotes, on drug boat, not in quotes, killed in strike by U.S. forces. “President Trump,” the Times writes, “said on Tuesday that the United States had carried out a strike against a boat carrying drugs and killed 11 ‘terrorists,’ the administration's latest military escalation in Mr. Trump's war against Venezuelan drug cartels that he has blamed for bringing fentanyl into the country.” The story goes on to say that he made a post on Truth Social in which he wrote, “earlier this morning on my orders, U.S. military forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua narco-terrorists.” The Times goes on to say he said the strike “occurred while the terrorists were at sea in international waters transporting illegal narcotics heading to the United States.” Before any external information has come in about exactly who was on the boat in the black and white snuff video of the airstrike that Trump put out, the administration is already unable to keep its own story straight. The online version of the Times story says that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a different story about where the boat was heading. In a deviation from Mr. Trump's account, however, the Times writes, “Mr. Rubio said that the vessel's destination was probably Trinidad or another country in the Caribbean.” So the boat that was blown up because it was smuggling drugs to the United States was not bound for the United States. No matter how many other pieces of the story likewise end up being contested or debunked, the people on the boat are still going to be dead. Despite having done, in Trump's own version of events, nothing that would rate the death penalty if they had simply been arrested, tried, and convicted. Given that the government was tracking the boat and filming it as it went, there doesn't seem to be any reason that U.S. forces didn't intercept the boat and make arrests, except that Donald Trump likes killing people, and he saw a chance here to do it. If you grant the administration its own illogic, and rhetorical framing. This was an act of war against Venezuela. If you don't, it was a military massacre of a civilian target in international waters. Either way, the Times decided to put it on page A7. 

What did make the front page of the Times? The right-hand lead column is yesterday morning's big news about the judge ruling that the federal military occupation of Los Angeles is illegal. Good story, definitely worthy of the slot. The Times, with its usual perverse belief that vagueness is the voice of authority, does make you take the jump and get down to something like the 18th paragraph before it mentions the Posse Comitatus Act by name. On page one, it chooses instead to say that the judge ruled that the administration had violated laws that had been in place since the late 1800s. This really is one of the screwiest habits that the Times has. They did at least specify the venue at the top of the story, saying the ruling was in the federal district court in San Francisco, but not taxing the readers with the information that it's the Northern District of California. But the Posse Comitatus Act was just too much detail to give the readers at the top of the piece. Even though Americans have been wrangling over the Posse Comitatus Act by name for at least three decades, ever since the American right set about convincing itself that Bill Clinton was a tyrant in waiting. 

The second news column is “Trump Warns Losing Tariffs Would Be Dire / The Billions Collected Are in Legal Limbo.” 

“President Trump signaled that he would ask the Supreme Court as soon as Wednesday to overturn a ruling that found many of his punishing tariffs to be illegal,” The Times writes, “claiming that an erosion in his power to wage a global trade war would inflict severe financial damage on the United States. Mr. Trump said the administration would ask the justices to render their decision on an expedited timeline, as he argued that the new legal uncertainty surrounding his tariffs had contributed to a recent drop in financial markets and could lead to devastation for our country.” Unfortunately for the Supreme Court's efforts to cling to the last scraps of its dignity or even plausibility, none of the reasons offered by the president in any way resemble a legal argument that he has, absent specific congressional authorization, the authority to write and rewrite trade policy as he pleases. The Times writes “a federal appeals court”—the Times makes you wait till after the jump to learn it was the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit—“late Friday ruled that Mr. Trump had vastly overstepped his authority to impose steep duties on nearly every U.S. trading partner, marking the second such defeat for the administration. For now,” the Times continues, “the court opted to leave the president's tariffs in place until October 14th in a move meant to allow the White House time to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. But its decision still threatened to upset the centerpiece of Mr. Trump's strategy. That hinges on his ability to impose tariffs instantly and seemingly without limit as a way of raising money, forcing countries to negotiate and attracting domestic industry.” 

Next to that story is a three-column picture of people searching through the wreckage in the Afghanistan earthquake, and the left-hand column is a news story about it. “Stories of Ruin And Heartache In Afghanistan / For One Family, Quake Hit ‘Like Doomsday.’” in a bleak and inadvertent sign of how isolated and how devastated the quake victims are, the death toll in the print edition is 1400, the same as it was yesterday morning, and the same as it remains in the news stories published today. Not because anyone thinks that's the limit to how many people were killed, but because in 24 hours, nobody seems to have made meaningful progress toward getting in and assessing the earthquake zone. 

Below the picture, above the fold, the headline is “Trump Climate Report Draws Scorn of Scientist / Picking Apart Findings That Soften Threat of Global Warming.” The Times lets the expert opinions lead the way into the fray. “More than 85 American and international scientists have condemned a Trump administration report that calls the threat of climate change overblown, saying the analysis is riddled with errors, misrepresentations, and cherry-picked data to fit the president's political agenda.” That's fine, but you could also write the top of the story to say, “a Trump administration report that calls the threat of climate change overblown is riddled with errors, misrepresentations, and cherry-picked data, according to more than 85 American and international scientists.” 

The experts aren't the main actors here. The news story isn't that they're condemning a bogus climate report from the Trump administration. It's that the Trump administration put out a bogus climate report. 

And down at the bottom of the page, the headline is, “Tepid Debut for a Crypto Token, but a Big Payday for the Trumps.” 

“The Trump family's cryptocurrency venture known as World Liberty Financial had a tepid first day of open market trading on Monday,” The Times writes, “surging in value initially before losing most of those gains. But because of an unusual insider arrangement, the Trump family was still assured a considerable payday as its expanding universe of crypto ventures continued to break norms for business dealings by presidential families.” Those norms would be the Emoluments Clause and the bribery statutes before the Supreme Court gutted those and then effectively put Trump out of reach of even what was left of them. But here, for once, there's no shortage of detail. Eric Lipton explains that the cryptocurrency token from World Liberty Financial was created in October, but couldn't be traded on public markets before now, meaning, the Times writes, “that after the 35,000 original buyers purchased a total of about $550 million worth of the tokens through this spring, they could not easily sell them.” The Times then recounts, “the price of the token started Monday at 8 a.m. at 20 cents and surged in the first five minutes to as high as about 40 cents. It then fell rapidly, settling at about 22 cents as of 5 p.m., lower than many followers of World Liberty, at least on social media, had expected. The Trump family itself,” the story says, “controls about 22.5 billion of the dollar-sign-WLF-1 tokens, suggesting that its holdings as of Monday afternoon were worth about $5 billion, making it one of the most valuable Trump assets. worth far more than its real estate holdings, such as its hotels and golf courses.” As members of the management team, the Trump family's not allowed to unload those tokens yet. But thanks to what the Times calls “an unusual deal with a relatively unknown NASDAQ-traded company called Alt-5 Sigma Corporation,” which put Eric Trump on its board of directors and two other members of World Liberty in leading spots, the Trumps were able to collect token sale proceeds from the trades that Alt-5 Sigma Corporation made, a payout that the Times writes is “probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The close corporate ties between Alt-5 and World Liberty might have attracted an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the past.” The Times writes, “Mr. Trump this year named a crypto-friendly securities lawyer to lead the commission. It is possible that the ties are now being reviewed, as some trade news organizations have reported recently, although Alt-5 has disputed this reporting. Alt5 did not respond on Monday to a request for comment.” 

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 are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.