Good morning. It is October 22nd. It's another more or less ideal October morning in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Donald Trump's demolition of the East wing of the White House continued yesterday, advancing well past the facade to smash the main structure. The New York Times belatedly realized that this was, in fact, front page news and put the picture on the front page at the top, four columns wide. But being the Times decided that the way to deal with the president unilaterally choosing to demolish a major section of the White House and replace it with an immense new structure designed to suit his own personal whims and taste, as if he were dispatching contractors to his own private property, though for that he would have been required to get permits, was to assign the strenuously clever Sean McCreesh to write yet another of his dispatches in which Trump's excesses and abuses of his office are archly treated as amusing expressions of his indomitable will. The headline is, “Rubble? It's a presidential dream being realized. Trump resumes major makeover of Capitol with big ballroom. The facade of the East Wing of the White House came crumbling down on Monday,” McCreesh writes, in the Wednesday paper, skipping over Tuesdays, more extensive demolitions, “as construction began on President Trump's 90,000 square foot ballroom, a project that will transform one of the most recognizable buildings in the world. Having already changed so much about the way Washington works, he's increasingly changing the way Washington looks”. That “looks” gets zany italics. The East Wing, McCreesh continues, “was one of the last pieces of the White House complex he hadn't yet started to make over in his own image. The Oval Office is dripping in gold, and so is the Cabinet Room. The Rose Garden looks like Mar-a-Lago. There are massive flagpoles in the backyard and in the front. He's been tweaking the White House residence upstairs, too. He's directing renovations at the Kennedy Center, and now he wants an Arc de Triomphe-style arch built on the other side of the Potomac. There's no telling just what this town might look like by the end of this term, but there will sure be a lot more to look at.” There you have the front page political analysis from one of the New York Times' Trump experts. A smug declaration that Trump will be Trump. After the jump, McCreesh writes, “Mr. Trump originally said back in July that the construction of his ballroom at a cost of more than $200 million won't interfere with the current building. But that always seemed unrealistic, given how big the plans were.” Seemed unrealistic is a funny way to talk about the president telling an outright lie, but it allows the Times reporters who sound as if the smash-up of the East Wing was something that he basically already knew was going to happen. “Last week,” the story then says, “he hosted a dinner at the White House with dozens of corporate executives who agreed to help finance the ballroom's construction, the money pouring in for it has sparked concerns from ethics experts who warn that it is just the latest way for the wealthy to buy access to the president. And what sorts of things might the ballroom actually be used for by this crypto billionaire president who has thrown dinners with his wealthiest meme coin holders?” Asking the question shows that you want to be seen thinking about it. Failing to mention even who all the people who gave the money were, shows how much you actually care about answering that question. One of the things that the story treats as even less important than the president's private financing of the project, is the fact that the New York Times got beat to the news. The credit to the Washington Post for breaking the story comes more than halfway through the jump portion, but its inclusion at all can't help pointing to the fact that this is maybe something more than an occasion for a little bit of colorful rumination. 

But then it's back to zooming along for a ride with our irrepressible president. “The president,” McCreech writes, “has a long history of tearing things to the ground. He was, after all, a real estate developer. In 1980, he ka-blammed the old Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan so that he could raise up Trump Tower. He promised to preserve the treasured limestone freezes atop the old building, but then went and jackhammered them into oblivion, infuriating the city's beau monde. He went to the 21 Club,” the reminiscence continues “with the Vanity Fair journalist Marie Brenner and asked her, ‘Whao you think? Do you think blowing up the sculptures has hurt me?’ She answered yes. ‘Who cares?’ He replied. ‘Let's say that I had given that junk to the Met. They would have just put them in their basement. I'll never have the goodwill of the establishment.’” You see, in his heart, the man's just a big old rebel. 

In other news about how the president can't be stopped from imposing his own ideas on the hoity-toity sensibilities of the stodgy old establishment, below the picture above the fold on the left side of the page, the headline is TRUMP DEMANDS INQUIRY DAMAGES / Said to Seek $230 Million From Justice Dept. President Trump,” the Times writes, “is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that any settlement might ultimately be approved by senior department officials who defended him or those in his orbit. The situation has no parallel in American history,” the Times writes, “as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims. It is also the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president's former lawyers atop the Justice Department.” Seems like this one has well and truly crossed over from potential conflicts to kinetic conflicts, leading to a wonderful moment of Meta-commentary right around the jump. “Lawyers,” the Times writes, “said the nature of the president's legal claims poses undeniable ethics challenges. ‘What a travesty,’ said Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University. ‘The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don't need a law professor to explain it.’” The Times then appends further explanation of it from him. 

These two genuinely shocking pieces of news, the White House demolition and the president's efforts to steal $230 million to punish the government for trying to investigate his crimes did not land in the top news spot. Instead, the lead news column belongs to a story that exists to gesture at how important the times considers a situation in which nothing new has quite happened. “VANCE, IN ISRAEL, STANDS BY TRUCE AFTER FLARE-UPS / BUT GIVES FEW DETAILS / Despite His Optimism on Gaza, No Deadline for Hamas to Disarm.” When you're typing, “but gives few details” in the second headline slot in your triple headline lead column format, you might ask yourself why you're doing it. “Vice president JD Vance,” the story says, “visited Israel on Tuesday amid US efforts to shore up the fragile ceasefire deal in Gaza, but he did not give a deadline for Hamas to disarm, or say how officials would ensure the militant group agrees to that key part of the accord.” So who cares? Shaky ceasefire, still shaky. 

The second news column belongs to a story that's likewise important, but not specifically driven by any new developments that a reader would need to be apprised of. “This Shutdown May Cut Deep Into Economy / Ripple Effects Beyond Lost Jobs and Wages.” The government shutdown is a long one. It's getting longer. That is probably going to do some meaningful economic damage. Everyone pretty much knew that before the paper arrived this morning. Inside at the bottom of the front page section of that story is a strange referral to page B1, “Budgetary twister to pay troops and law enforcement. The president stretched the limits of his spending powers.” Stretched the limits, as usual, means he did something that seems illegal, sending out money to pay, as the story says, “military service members, immigration agents, and other federal law enforcement officials, even though lawmakers have not approved new money for their wages.” Is that a business story? That doesn't seem like a business story. If anything, the story about the shutdown harming the economy would be a better candidate for the business section than a story about the president seizing spending power from Congress. 

But also one good way to make more room in the A section for the news of the day would have been to do something else with the story that sits at the bottom of the front page. “A Trek to a Shrine and a Swerve to a Dark Path / Inside Missing Months of Luigi Mangione.: There are four bylines on the story and the top of it is just jammed into that little box without even an image, so that it's cut off for the jump before it's finished the third of its leisurely, writerly, introductory paragraphs, which begin, “deep within the lush mountains of Japan, among the thousands of peaks that form a sprawling peninsula on the country's main island,” and then exhausts its front page real estate in the middle of saying, “the video game Assassin's Creed Shadows follows a samurai as he travels to Mount…” and then we get the jump. Nowhere, except in the subhead, does the name Luigi Mangione appear on the front. He shows up in the fourth paragraph, after the Assassin's Creed video game, after the jump. But the story then sprawls out over two full pages and more than half of another with a giant photograph of misty green mountains. And why? Why is this story simultaneously getting too much room and such short shrift. It's only October. You still have more than two months to roll out all your prize bait stories and give them room to breathe. People can read about Luigi Mangione anytime. He's not going anywhere. 

Meanwhile, a story that's not on page one, but on page A16, a page that is, neatly enough, equipped with “The 47th president” page header is “Pardoned January 6th rioter is charged with threats to top House Democrat. An upstate New York man pardoned by President Trump after taking part in the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, was charged last week with a new crime, threatening to assassinate Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, at an event in New York City. The man, Christopher P. Moynihan, 34, sent text messages to an unknown associate on Friday, threatening Mr. Jeffries' life, according to a criminal complaint issued by local prosecutors in Dutchess County, New York. ‘Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC. cannot allow this terrorist to live.’ The complaint quoted Mr. Moynihan as saying, ‘even if I am hated, he must be eliminated. I will kill him for the future.’ This story goes on to say that Moynihan has a long history of drug addiction and petty crime. “On January 6th,” the Times writes, “prosecutors say he was among the first group of rioters to break into the Capitol, pushing through police lines and ultimately breaching the Senate chamber. There, court papers say he rifled through a notebook on top of a senator's desk.” Further down, once again in search of third-party validation for the obvious, The Times writes, “Experts in political violence have long expressed concerns that the clemency Mr. Trump extended to the January 6th rioters, including those who assaulted police officers, could lead to further politically tinged violence.” Experts do say that.

Not in the paper at all, is the news that federal immigration forces hit Canal Street yesterday, apparently sent there by a right-wing influencer posting on social media about how there were unlicensed vendors who seemed to be African, selling counterfeit handbags down there. Protesters descended on the scene and the NYPD disavowed any involvement in the raid. 

In Los Angeles, meanwhile, CNN and the LA Times reported that a US Marshal and an undocumented immigrant were shot and wounded by an ICE agent in the course of the ICE agent using his service weapon to smash a car window and trying to grab the person he was targeting. That person, Carlitos Ricardo Parias, is a TikTok streamer who's been covering immigration raids. He's been charged with assault on a federal officer. 

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. Keep an eye peeled out there for goons. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.