Good morning. It is January 6th, the day the new Congress settles in to certify the election of a new president. It's a gray morning in Manhattan, with light snow falling, as the lower parts of the mid-Atlantic catch a real winter storm, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Donald Trump, who is constitutionally ineligible to be president after his attempt to violently overthrow the previous election, four years ago today, is scheduled to have his electoral college victory certified today by Congress without any meaningful planned objections, let alone disruptions. The coup took a while, but it paid off in the end. 

This morning's New York Times welcomes the certification of the new Trump era by devoting the lead news spot two columns wide to a news analysis piece by Jonathan Weissman, “How the Democrats Lost the Working Class Vote. Rancor rose as policies left some behind.” Here comes the obligatory reminder that Jonathan Weissman is that guy who got himself briefly in trouble for posting that nonwhite Democrats weren't real Midwesterners or Southerners, a claim that specifically excluded by name, John Lewis, from Southern-ness. And so, unavoidably, after an introduction about deindustrialization and neoliberal centrism hollowing out American industrial employment over the decades, Weisman writes, “The Democratic Party’s estrangement from working-class voters first became clear with Mr. Trump’s upset of Hillary Clinton in 2016, powered by broad shifts in the preferences of white voters without college degrees.” That's what he wrote. “white voters without college degrees.” With class identity, as with regional identity, Weisman's fundamental concepts of the country, encouraged and rewarded by his editors, is that white people are the real people. The working class is not the working class. It's an idealized, socially conservative white man. Weisman then, in his eagerness to assign the mandate of heaven and the blessing of real white America to Donald Trump, describes his modest electoral victory in narrow popular vote plurality in the 2024 election as an “emphatic defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris.” That result, he writes, “was a reckoning for a party that thought it had fixed its problems with blue collar voters by heavily reinvesting in domestic manufacturing, but instead discovered even more erosion, this time among Black and Latino workers.” To his credit, Weisman isn't taking the occasion to glob onto the rapidly congealing reactionary centrist consensus about what happened in the election. He writes “many Democrats have blamed recent social issues like transgender rights or the woke language embraced by many on the left, but the economic seeds of mr. Trump's victories were sewn long ago,” but he doesn't have any idea what to do with this analytically or narratively. Next up comes one of the most self-defeating phrases in any argument writers repertoire, “to be sure.”

“To be sure,” he writes, “blue collar voters have long been fickle. Richard Nixon's silent majority delivered him a landslide in 1972, propelled not by Republican economic platform, but by a backlash to civil rights legislation and anti-Vietnam War protests. The so-called Reagan Democrats, stung by inflation and economic malaise, helped give the White House back to the GOP eight years later, and it remained in Republican hands for 12 long years.” Again, unavoidably, in the Nixon story, “blue collar” means white people, but, also, “fickle” is not exactly the word for the Southern strategy. The old democratic strongholds of Dixie did not go to Nixon and Reagan because the voters there were fickle. They went that way because the voters had very clear, consistent ideas about what they wanted to hear from politicians. And so the piece goes on and on, with a materialist account of Democratic failures in which the material policies of Republicans somehow don't really figure, working its way around in the end to grapple unsuccessfully with the question of why. Joe Biden's strong support for labor failed to translate into enthusiasm for Biden's presidency or for the Harris campaign, and ends up blaming the American rescue plan for causing inflation, even though inflation spiked everywhere around the world, on the same trajectory, whether countries passed aggressive spending plans or not. I would say who needs facts when you've got a story to tell. But again, he doesn't really have a story to tell either. 

As counterpoint on page one, below the fold, there's a news analysis piece by Peter Baker. “Disaster? No. Trump inherits nation in pretty good shape. To hear President-elect Donald J. Trump tell it,” Baker writes, he is about to take over a nation ravaged by crisis, a desolate hellscape of crime, chaos and economic hardship. “Our country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the world, he declared on social media last week.” But Baker continues, “by many traditional metrics, the America that Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden when he takes the oath for a second time two weeks from Monday,” two weeks from Monday? Ouch. They're just not copy editing the time pegs for the print edition at all, are they? 

When he takes the oath for a second time—two weeks from today—“is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since George W. Bush came into office in 2001. For the first time since that transition 24 years ago, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days indicate that murders are way down. Illegal immigration at the southern border has fallen even below where it was when Mr. Trump left office, and roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter century. Jobs are up, wages are rising and the economy is growing as fast as it did during Mr. Trump's presidency. Unemployment is as low as it was just before the COVID-19 pandemic and near its historic best. Domestic energy production is higher than it has ever been. The manufacturing sector has more jobs than under any president since Mr. Bush. Drug overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years. Even inflation, the scourge of the Biden presidency, has returned closer to normal, although prices remain higher than they were four years ago.” Huh.

After four years of bludgeoning coverage of inflation as the only economic measure that reflects quality of life, now it's suddenly a coda at the end of an account of overall robustness. If only that message had gotten out sooner. 

On the opposite side of the front page, the headline is, “Signs of CTE Vexed Soldier in Vegas Blast,” as the Times waves off the political manifesto of the Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber, to fold him instead into its ongoing coverage of the nation's brain trauma crisis. 

On page A13, meanwhile, the lethal New Orleans drug attack, whose perpetrator pledged his loyalty to ISIS rather than to Donald Trump, gets the headline, “How the Islamic State Inspires Followers to Incite Chaos Worldwide.” Later today, I should have a column going up on Defector dealing with the question of why one guy's motives are political and the other guy's motives are traumatic, especially pertinent question on January 6th. 

The rest of the top of page one is taken up with an important, well-reported, and disgracefully overwritten story, profiling a man who says he killed dozens of people as a hitman working for Rodrigo Duterte on his rise to become president of the Philippines. It begins “Dateline Manila. There are, the hitman said, many ways to kill,” and it gets much worse from there.

Soon there's “a fierce rain sent water skittering into the room. Mosquitoes followed. He slapped one dead, its body oozing someone else's blood.” If your reporting's right, this guy killed real people. Lots of them. You didn't need to wring a goddamn portentous image out of a fucking mosquito. Mosquitoes feed on blood. Yes, they have blood in them. When you squish them, there's a little spot of blood. This guy killed 50-plus people.

Why are you stepping on your own story like that? Later on, as we continue learning about Edgar Matobato, we get, “though Mr. Matobato cannot read, he understood the irregular jags of his electrocardiogram, signs of a troubled heart.” Yeah, presumably a cardiologist explained it to him. It's not some weird paradox that an illiterate person can understand what he's told at a doctor's appointment. The story of Rodrigo Duterte's brutal rise to power is grim and hugely important, but the Times apparently believes it's a stage for a writer to do a tap dance on. Here's how the story describes cutting up bodies. “Mr. Matobato said he would slice through the thorax, remove the vital organs and lop the limbs.” 

“Lop the limbs,” not the ordinary if somewhat inappropriately casual English idiom “lop off” the limbs, but “lop the limbs.” See, it's got those two L sounds separated by only a little bounce. “Lop the limbs.” A perky piece of poetry about people. People who got chopped to bits after being brutally murdered so that their grieving families would never even know the peace of finding out what happened to them. And that, dear listeners, is what we call Writering. 

And there's some breaking news this morning. Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, announced that he is resigning as leader of the Liberal Party, suspending parliament and staying on as a caretaker prime minister to resign after the party chooses new leadership. 

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. Our podcasting work is sustained through the subscription dollars and tip dollars of you, our faithful listeners.

Please keep those coming. And if nothing unexpected happens, and we can squeeze it into a tight morning schedule, we will talk again tomorrow.