Good morning. It's October 7th. The sun has belatedly arrived 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. There is a little hammering going on in the background, but we will get through it. 

In breaking news this morning, Philip Banks, the city's deputy mayor for public safety and a close friend of Mayor Eric Adams, resigned today. Till now Banks had seemed more or less immune to any effects of scandal, holding down his job despite the revelation that federal investigators had named him an unindicted co-conspirator in an NYPD robbery case in 2014. But now, as one Adams official after another resigns under current federal investigation, he's joined the outflow. 

Hurricane Milton has intensified to category four and is headed for the west coast of Florida, moving more west to east, than the south to north track taken by Hurricane Helene. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, a four-column headline marks the anniversary of Hamas's October 7th attack on Israel. “A year-old war endures and threatens to spread.” Under that, the subordinate headline in the far right column is “Israel and Hamas dash hopes for compromise.” Sharing the space under the big headline is “In towns attacked on October 7th, a ghostly existence.” It turns out a year of mass slaughter in Gaza in retaliation for the attacks hasn't fixed anything for the people who were attacked. 

Below the jump on that, the headline is, “Israel was prepared for a fight with Hezbollah, but ending conflict will be harder.” What does it mean to have been prepared for a war if you don't actually have a plan about what to do in the war or how to get out of it? If only the United States had been in a position to offer its ally some hard-won advice on that subject.

On the left-hand side of page one, the Times continues its sharp turn in the coverage of the presidential race. “Trump reignites question of age with ramblings, increasing stridency, analysis and observers note changes in his speech pattern.” The lead by Peter Baker and Dillon Friedman is, “Former president Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with the vice president Kamala Harris was on his side, except that there was no audience. The debate was held in an empty hall. No one went crazy, as Mr. Trump put it, because no one was there.” The story continues. “It was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent, or disconnected from reality lately. In fact,” the story continues, “it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.” Right. So what is the process by which a presidential candidate's behavior generates attention?

What is a page one story in the New York Times, if not an act of attention? And how did the Times come to do the thing that the Times is reporting no one is doing? The top headline is a genuinely mind boggling piece of obfuscation. “Trump reignites question of age with ramblings.” How has Trump reignited the question? The New York Times politics desk is reigniting the question. As is the Washington Post, which went with “Trump mixes up words, swerves among subjects in off-topic speech.” Subhead, “the Republican nominee, appeared tired and complained about his heightened campaign schedule.” Although that one wasn't on the print front page. But as we discussed last week, Trump isn't doing anything new. “He rambles,” the Times writes. “He repeats himself. He roams from thought to thought. Some of hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own ‘beautiful body.’ He relishes a great day in Louisiana after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is ‘trying to kill me’ when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.” 

Okay, five weeks ago in public, Donald Trump wasn't clear about who he was running for president against. All that other rambling and repetition and the rest of it has been on full display ever since he hit the campaign trail again. As with last week's Times story about his health, all of this was there to be observed and could have been on the table months ago and certainly immediately as soon as age proved to be an insuperable problem for Joe Biden. Trump can't talk right. He can't think straight. And he's obviously lost the ability to regulate and control his impulses and his emotions. Yet for some reason, the Times felt compelled to wait until autumn of the election year before trying to make a story of it. 

Down in the bottom left corner of the page is a mistimed profile of Philip Banks and his brother, former school's chancellor David Banks, and their consultant brother Terrence Banks under the headline, “Bribery Inquiry Mars the Rise of New York's Banks Brothers.” Nothing wrong with that when they wrote it, but by now it's less a matter of a rise being marred, if a rise really can be marred, and more just a straight up downfall. Eric Adams’ troubles move faster than the printing presses can spin. 

Next to that is disinformation is hampering Helene recovery. And look at an important and alarming problem that's oddly vague about where the problem is coming from. It's not that disinformation is getting in the way of the rescue effort. It's that people are interfering with the rescue effort by spreading disinformation. 

After the jump, down toward the fold, the Times writes, “the conspiracy theories and rumors on X after Helene tore through the Southeast have also been circulated and elevated by high profile figures, including Elon Musk, who has pulled back on content moderation and repeatedly amplified disinformation to his millions of followers since he bought the social media platform. Representatives for X were not immediately available for comment. Former president Donald J. Trump,” the Times continues, “has also falsely claimed that disaster relief funds were being diverted to house undocumented migrants and suggested without evidence that Democrats were not eager to help conservative residents.” Why the passive voice on conspiracy theories being circulated by Elon Musk? Elon Musk circulated conspiracy theories. He deliberately optimized a machine for misinformation and then the machine cranked out misinformation. And meanwhile, on page he's jumping around like an nincompoop at a Donald Trump rally, as if the two sources misleading the public about the hurricane and the hurricane response are really just one thing. 

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. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. There may or may not be a podcast tomorrow, depending on how it fits in around a scheduled vocal tune-up. But if we don't talk then, if all goes well, we will talk again on Wednesday.