Good morning. It is November 7th. It is another muggy morning in New York in November, although it's supposed to dry out later today. I'm not sure the vocal rehab exercises are quite a match for the accumulated strain today, but here we are. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. Or are we?

The front of the New York Times has the screaming, now that we can meet our print deadline, let's stamp this one on history headline, “Trump storms back.” Giant letters across the whole top. “He defeats Harris and caps his resurgence from outcast to felon to president-elect.” Fair enough, although bracketing “felon” between the “tos” makes it sound like an intermediate stage rather than his effective ongoing legal status, not that I'll serve a minute of time if they ever even bother to hold his sentencing hearing.

So far, it seems like the indelible image of the second Trump administration Came on election day when Rudy Giuliani rolled up to the polls driving a Mercedes convertible that he had been ordered to surrender as part of the whopping damages to the poll workers he defamed by falsely accusing them of working to steal the 2020 election from Trump and which his lawyer had claimed could not be located, along with all the possessions that were stripped from Giuliani's apartment rather than surrendered. Why shouldn't Rudy drive the Mercedes? What are they going to do? Take him to court? The law is for other people. 

As the Times notes down at the bottom of the page in the left-hand column, under a rubric I haven't seen before, “court cases, “Legal strategy,” the headline says, delay, “deflect, win the office. For all that Donald J. Trump's election to a second term was a remarkable political comeback,” the story begins, “it was also the culmination of an audacious and stunningly successful legal strategy that could allow him to evade accountability for the array of charges against him.” The story makes a nod to the nonsense claim that his criminal troubles actually bolstered his political standing. But what it really describes is how the impotence and fecklessness of the prosecutors and Trump's foothold on the judiciary made it impossible to read his crimes into the record for the voters' political consideration. “Having taken his gamble,” the Times writes “Mr. Trump will now get his payoff. Jack Smith, the special counsel, has begun discussions about how to wind down the two federal cases he brought against Mr. Trump in keeping with a longstanding Justice Department policy that bars prosecution of sitting presidents, a person familiar with the discussion said Wednesday. That policy effectively dooms the indictment in Washington, accusing Mr. Trump of subverting the 2020 election. And,” the Times continues, “it will probably result in prosecutors under his command dropping Mr. Smith's attempts to reinstate the charges in the classified documents case, which were dismissed this summer in an unexpected decision by a federal judge in Florida.” Not just any federal judge in Florida, but, as the story points out later, “one of his own appointees as a judge, Aileen Cannon, an inexperienced jurist who had previously intervened to help him in the investigation.” Still further along, the story looks at how the Washington case got stuck despite “a judge, Tanya S. Chutkan,” the Times writes, “who made clear she wanted to keep the proceedings moving briskly. To thwart that,” the Times explains, “Trump's lawyers used a legal appeal asserting he should not have been prosecuted in the first place because former presidents were largely immune from charges stemming from official acts they took in office. As a legal argument,” the Times notes, “it seemed at first like a long shot. But as a procedural matter, it forced Judge Chutkan to postpone her initial plan to start the trial in March of this year so that the Supreme Court, with a strong conservative majority, bolstered by Trump appointees, could weigh in on the question. The justices not only took up the immunity issue, but took months to hear it and announce their ruling, all but ending any chance of Mr. Trump going before a jury before Election Day. And when the decision came down in July, the court ruled, 6 to 3, that former presidents have broad immunity from prosecution for official acts.” And now he has four more years of official acts ahead of him. 

The rest of the coverage is more or less what the script says it has to be. Peter Baker does take a somewhat appropriately sour look at the atavism of the Trump campaign. “For the first time in history, he writes, Americans have elected a convicted criminal as president. They handed power back to a leader who tried to overturn a previous election, called for the termination of the Constitution to reclaim his office, aspired to be a dictator on day one, and vowed to exact retribution against his adversaries.” 

Maybe the most meaningful story about Trump in the paper is one that's not about Trump at all. On page A8, under the “War in the Middle East” banner, and below the story with Trump, “Israeli leader envisions a more favorable US president” is a news analysis of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decision in the protective shadow of the American Election Day to fire Yoav Golan as defense minister. “By firing a popular rival who had opposed some of his most divisive policies, Mr. Netanyahu, the Times writes, has fueled criticism that he thinks his personal survival is more important than the national interest.” Oddly, while the story does frame the move as a matter of Netanyahu's political maneuvering to keep himself in power, it skips over the fact that ongoing criminal corruption trials are waiting for him whenever the exigencies of wartime leadership become less pressing. Does that account for Israel's decision to pursue unending escalation to the point of flattening southern Lebanon once there was nothing left in Gaza to flatten? The point is, when your country is being run by a criminal egomaniac, you can't trust that any decision, even a decision with a five or six figure body count attached, is being made out of anything but self-interest. 

For the rest of the analysis of Trump's victory this morning, it's time to leave the New York Times behind and go to Oliver Darcy's Status newsletter, which recounts the part of the story that the media have no interest in writing. “Over the course of the last 18 months,” Darcy wrote, “facilitated in part by business people trying to best position their companies for success in a polarizing climate, most of the guardrails that technology and news organizations erected in the aftermath of Trump's 2020 defeat were willfully lowered. Even some of the fundamental lessons from the 2016 election were thrown out the door. It all led to an information environment rife with pollution, making it easier for Trump to reclaim power. Broadly speaking,” Darcy writes, “Trump reemerged from exile after the January 6th insurrection and found a media environment lacking either the resolve or desire to stand up to his menacing behavior. In Silicon Valley,” he continues, “Trump's suspensions were lifted by the Mark Zuckerberg-controlled Meta, and Elon Musk-owned X. Musk, the self-described dark mega billionaire, transformed Twitter into a right-wing megaphone with nowhere near enough scrutiny from news organizations and journalists, most of whom continue to inexplicably lend their credibility to the zombie platform by remaining active on it. The Sundar Pichai-led Google allowed election misinformation to course through YouTube, even monetizing some of the dangerous lies, and across the entire industry, content moderation teams were cut and discarded in favor of maximizing profits. Instead of being served up authoritative content from trusted sources, a younger generation of voters who absorb news through osmosis on social media, or algorithmically fed a diet of Joe Rogan and Theo von clips. Further on,” he writes that “a diminished CNN assumed a far less aggressive stance toward Trump under David Zaslav's Warner Brothers discovery. The Mark Thompson-led network, which helped set the tone for other newsrooms and which the world needed a muscular version of more than ever, resumed carrying much of the president-elect's lie-filled remarks live to its audience and made dishonest Scott Jennings-type pundits a core part of its programming.”

What Darcy calls an “industry-wide failure” extended across the mainstream major outlets and right wing ones. As Rupert Murdoch, who Darcy knows once vowed to make Trump “a non-person,” capitulated to him. “Trump's appalling behavior,” Darcy writes, “which was once considered disqualifying and condemned by leaders across the news media and technology space was met with considerably less pushback this time around. Collectively, it is hard to argue that none of this mattered. As one news anchor commented to me, Trump's victory was in part due to the normalization of his behavior.” And he writes, “Outside any real public displays of courage, there appeared to be little soul searching as well. News and technology executives do not seem to believe that their choices helped contribute to Trump's political comeback — a significant departure from 2016 in which self-reflection consumed the industry for months. Some journalists I spoke with felt strongly that their institutions should have sounded a louder alarm. But it doesn't appear as if that feeling is shared with their bosses in the c-suites. 

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, and have a look at Darcy's newsletter at status.news. And circumstances permitting, we will talk again tomorrow.