Good morning. It is October 24th. It's sunny and chilly again in New York City. An exemplary performance by the month of October. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Much of the front of this morning's print New York Times is taken up by the things that were breaking news yesterday morning. Trump's corrupt pardon of the Binance boss, Changpeng Zhao, is in the lead news spot. “TRUMP PARDONS CRYPTO MAGNATE BEHIND BINANCE / UNDOING A CRACKDOWN / Firm Founded by Tycoon Has Deal With First Family’s Start-Up.” Excellent headline stack gets right to the point. No evasions. 

Then there's “U.S. Charges Insiders in N.B.A. Gambling Scams / Coach and Others Also Named in Poker Plots With Mafia Ties.” Again, we talked about that one yesterday when it broke, and Trying to Slow Mamdani, Adams Backs Cuomo / A Testy Relationship Is Repaired With Speed.” 

We'll get back to the rest of the front page in a bit, but on the website, the Times this morning published a piece that really digs into and emphasizes the point that its reporters keep making, down inside the incremental coverage of Donald Trump's ongoing campaign of slaughter at sea. It's a NEWS ANALYSIS piece by Charlie Savage, “The peril of a White House that flaunts its indifference to the law. The White House has made no legal argument explaining its bald claim that the president has wartime power to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs.” It's gonna take some restraint for me not to just read the whole story into the microphone. “Since he returned to office nine months ago,” Savage writes, “President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts, but his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart.” That's really well-tuned. It avoids even the slight misstep of the subheadline by describing the targets of the president's attacks as people “accused” of smuggling drugs, not people “suspected,” since “suspected” is an internal state with a degree of imputed sincerity behind it that Donald Trump has absolutely not earned. The story continues. “A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump's orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders, regardless of whether the 43 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in 10 strikes so far were indeed running drugs. The administration,” the story continues, “insists that the killings are lawful, invoking legal terms like ‘self-defense’ and ‘armed conflict,’ but it has offered no legal argument explaining how to bridge the conceptual gap between drug trafficking and associated crimes, as serious as they are, and the kind of armed attack to which those terms can legitimately apply. The irresistible gravity of killing, coupled with the lack of a substantive legal justification, is bringing into sharp review a structural weakness of law as a check on the American presidency.” That little wobbly Timesian construct about “bringing into sharp review” is bearable here because unlike its usual usage, which marks the Times’s closest point of approach to whatever rude and uncomfortable truth, the paper is not quite prepared to set down in plain language, Savage deploys it on his way pretty much straight to the heart of the matter. “It is becoming clearer than ever,” the story continues, “that the rule of law in the White House has depended chiefly on norms, on government lawyers willing to raise objections when merited and to resign in protest if ignored, and on presidents who want to appear law-abiding. This is especially true in an era when party loyalty has defanged the threat of impeachment by Congress, and after the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from prosecution, for crimes committed with official powers.” The piece then contrasts the vacuous indifference with which Trump has pursued the killings with the efforts by previous administrations to justify or cover up their own efforts to expand or abuse the accepted limits of power. Then the story says plainly, “In peacetime, targeting civilians, even suspected criminals who pose no threat of imminent violence, is considered murder. In peacetime, targeting civilians — even suspected criminals — who pose no threat of imminent violence is considered murder. In an armed conflict, it is a war crime. International law accepted by the U.S. military says that, as do U.S. laws. By asserting that he can have the military kill people suspected of drug trafficking as if they are enemy soldiers on a battlefield, Mr. Trump is blurring a line between enforcing the law and waging a war.”

Savage then shreds the administration's attempts to classify what it's doing as a matter of self-defense or of armed conflict. “To legally kill someone in self-defense,” the story says, “the deadly force must be necessary to prevent an imminent threat of death or significant injury. In an armed conflict, though, one can legally kill someone based on the person's status as a member of the enemy force, even if that person poses no immediate threat. But for an armed conflict to exist, there must be a certain intensity and duration of combat. Why is carrying drugs on a speedboat 1,500 miles from Florida the kind of vessel the Coast Guard and Navy could easily seize, an imminent threat of death? Why is trafficking cocaine, not fentanyl, an armed attack on the United States? Why does crewing a drug-running boat make someone a targetable combatant rather than a criminal? What,” the story asks, “is the theory for transmuting acts of crime into acts of war?” The answer is they got nothing. Savage describes how an administration official responded to the reporting on the story by referring the Times to a statement that the president gave to Congress after one of the attacks in which he asserted that the drug overdose rate in the United States justified declaring the country in armed conflict with drug cartels. But the story says “even putting aside the key factual discrepancy between fentanyl and cocaine for overdose deaths, the notice contains no legal theory. It does not mention international and domestic laws governing force. It does not cite court precedents and analyze how they might apply. It offers no explanation for how Mr. Trump could legally determine that trafficking drugs is legally an armed attack, giving him the power to lawfully order killings in response.” There's more even than that. It's a thorough and relentless story. And maybe it'll give the editors something to think about when Trump blows up a 10th boat and they're deciding how they're going to cover it. 

Another promising sign in that direction, though, on page A9 in today's paper, there's an article about the dead bodies washing up in Trinidad, burned and with their limbs apparently blown off, with no real plausible origin but the President's massacres. 

Back on the front page, the five-column photo across the top is of Ukrainian soldiers in an artillery emplacement. To go with the story on the left-hand side of the page, “PUTIN DISMISSES LATEST SANCTIONS / Trump Imposes Curbs on 2 Russian Oil Giants. A day after President Trump's first major punitive action against Russia over its war in Ukraine, President Vladimir V Putin on Thursday called new U.S. oil sanctions an unfriendly act and warned of an overwhelming response if Kiev gets the powerful missiles it seeks. Speaking with journalists in Moscow, Mr. Putin said that the sanctions against the two biggest Russian oil giants would have hurt the country's economy, but that Moscow would never make any concessions under pressure.’ This is an unfriendly act toward Russia and it doesn't strengthen relations between Russia and the United States that only began to get restored,’ Mr. Putin said, ‘but no self-respecting country and no self-respecting people ever decide anything under pressure.’” 

Next to that is a collection of little stamp-sized AI slop propaganda images promoted by Donald Trump, leading to a story inside the paper on page A16. AI slop appears to be a topic on which the Times is okay with using confrontational language. The headline is “How Trump deploys fake AI videos to assail rivals and stoke supporters,” and the lead is “The era of AI propaganda is here and President Trump is an enthusiastic participant. After nationwide protests this weekend against Mr. Trump's administration the president posted an AI generated video to his truth social account depicting himself as a fighter pilot careening through major cities and dropping excrement on protesters.”

That's a big improvement from earlier coverage where I think the Times called it “brown liquid,” not wanting to commit to describing the video as depicting what everyone understood it was clearly meant to depict. 

Back on page one, the side and a little bit above the AI slop images. The story is “Newest battle over districts is in Virginia. The next front in the nation's pitched battle over mid-decade congressional redistricting is opening in Virginia, where Democrats are planning the first step toward redrawing congressional maps, a move that could give their party two or three more seats. The surprise development, which was announced by legislators on Thursday, would make Virginia the second state, after California, in which Democrats try to counter a wave of Republican moves demanded by President Trump, to redistrict states to their advantage before the 2026 midterm elections. No other democratic state has begun redistricting proceedings while several Republican states have drawn new maps or are deliberating doing so.” 

And down at the bottom of the page, the Times returns to the Louvre heist for a think piece about how the thieves demonstrated that wearing workers' high visibility safety vests can make people what one of the Times sources calls “socially invisible.”

“Other criminals,” the Times writes, “have donned the vests to rob jewelry stores and airports, commit murders and steal cars, daub buildings and graffiti, and strip buildings of valuable metal wiring.” 

Inside the paper on page A15, there's a trio of stories about education and the new political repression. “A Long Island school district, the Times wrires, has sued New York State's education department after the state blocked the district from requiring its students to use bathrooms that align with their sex assigned at birth. In a federal lawsuit filed on Tuesday in the Eastern District of New York, the Massapequa School District said a recent order from the department demanded that the school district permit biological males to enter intimate spaces with biological females.” 

Next to that, the headline is “Harvard's Black and Hispanic Enrollment Falls. The percent of Black and Hispanic students in Harvard's first year class dropped this fall, while that of Asian-American students increased, according to figures released on Thursday. With more evidence that a 2023 Supreme Court ban on affirmative action is having a significant effect on racial diversity at the nation's elite schools. Harvard College said that 11.5 % of its first year students identify as Black this fall, down from 14 % last year, and 18 % in 2023, before the Supreme Court ban took effect. While the decline is not as sharp as some experts had predicted, it reverses a trend toward increased racial diversity that began in the 1960s. The numbers released by Harvard College showed an even sharper drop this year for Hispanic students to 11 % of this year's first year class from 16 % last year. The percentage of Hispanic students had increased last year from 2023, however. Harvard did not release figures for white students.” 

And then down at the bottom of the page, the headline is “Top university cuts deal with White House.” A surprising bit of license from the Ivy League-focused Times, given that “top university” here is supposed to refer to the University of Virginia. “The University of Virginia,” the Times writes, “facing immense pressure from the White House, struck a deal with the Trump administration on Wednesday that removed, at least temporarily, the threat of a federal investigation. The Justice Department announced the deal. It was the first time a public university had cut a far reaching agreement with the Trump administration, which is carrying out an extraordinary campaign to shift the ideological tilt of higher education.” Saying “shift the ideological tilt” is granting the administration its essential premise, and that it would mean that there is an ideological tilt, and the Trump administration is simply applying a corrective counter-tilt. “The deal,” the Times writes, “which avoids the hefty fines agreed to by some private Ivy League colleges, was viewed as something of a victory among leaders of the Charlottesville, Virginia-based campus. It was signed one week after Paul Mahoney, the school's interim president, rejected a White House offer of preferential treatment for research funding. The University of Virginia's deal was less onerous than other agreements in large part because James E. Ryan had resigned as president of the university in June, according to people familiar with the negotiations. The administration viewed Mr. Ryan as an obstacle in its bid to root out policies focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Basically, the deal amounts to a federal re-segregation order. The investigations into the university are being paused by the Justice Department as the school provides the Justice Department with updates on how its efforts to de-diversify its admissions procedures have worked out.

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. Get out and grab some of the ongoing fine autumnal weather while you can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.