Good morning. It is January 8th. It is a cold, windy morning in New York City. Today's copy of the New York Times, damp and crusted with salt from the stoop, has dried out, and that means it's time for your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Fires whipped by winds gusting up to 100 miles an hour continue to tear through Los Angeles, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate. The winds are expected to subside some, later in the day, but there are four separate fires burning now. More than a thousand homes have already burned. The Los Angeles Times reports devastation along the Pacific Coast Highway and that firefighting aircraft can't fly in the high winds. 

Projected by an appeals court, Donald Trump has now petitioned the Supreme Court to block his sentencing on his 34 convictions for falsifying business records in New York State. The judge has already said that the sentencing will not include any penalties, and so, Trump is asking the court simply to intervene to prevent his presidency from being stained by the fact of his felony convictions. It barely qualifies as a legal question, but the Supreme Court's chosen jurisprudence barely qualifies as the law, so his lawyers figure it's worth a shot. The AP offers some important context.

in its story on the filing. “The emergency motion,” the AP writes, “is from lawyers John Sauer, Trump's pick for Solicitor General, who represents the government before the high court, and Todd Blanch, in line to be the second ranking official at the Justice Department.” 

That now crackly and wrinkled front page of the Times is one of its unusual reverse layouts today. Instead of a lead news story atop right, there is a four-column picture of the horse-drawn caisson carrying Jimmy Carter's coffin toward the Capitol. 

Below it is a Washington memo from Peter Baker about how Jimmy Carter and official Washington despised each other. Under the relatively polite headline, “Carter, always a proud outsider, receives the Capitol's embrace.” The story proper describes the relationship between the Carter administration and establishment in Washington as a blend of piety, pettiness, jealousy, and condescension. Piety at least, presumably referring to the Carter side. Official Washington hates to have its pieties called pieties. 

Below that, there's a Robert McFadden obituary of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who committed the most decent act of his life by dying yesterday, bringing revelers out into the streets of Paris. McFadden opens the obituary by describing him as the founding father of France's modern political far right, who built a half century career on the rants of barely disguised racism, anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi propaganda. In perfect harmony with that, the story continues. “His death was confirmed on X by Jordan Bardella, the president of the party Mr. Le Pen founded.” Well done by the Times, elevating that above the family's announcement of the death as a news peg. Although ultimately the juxtaposition of X with a mention of barely disguised neo-Nazi propaganda evokes a brighter time when neo-Nazis thought some disguise, however bare was necessary. As the story notes, Le Pen's neo-Nazi party is now, in modestly rebranded form under his daughter, a powerful force in mainstream French politics. 

Back up at the top of the page, there's “Schools braced for ICE agents at their doors, anxiety about Trump's immigration policies. If immigration agents arrive on the doorstep of a New York City public school,” the Times writes, “principals have been told what to do. Ask the officers to wait outside and call a school district lawyer. The school system has enrolled about 40,000 recent immigrant students since 2020. Now, as president-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office with promises to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, the district has shared with school staff a protocol to try to shield students who have a tenuous legal status.” 

On the jump page for that story, the top headline is, “House Passes Bill to Deport Immigrants Charged with Minor Crimes.” The key word there is “charged,” not convicted. 48 Democrats joined Republicans to vote for a separate track of law for immigrants, unburdened by niceties like conviction before punishment. Not that that's a huge priority in the criminal justice system anyway. Still, the Times writes, “the bipartisan vote, 264 to 159, illustrated how some Democrats, stung by their party's electoral losses in November, are reassessing their stances on issues like immigration, even as they brace for a far more severe approach under Mr. Trump.”

Not only is Trump delivering on exactly what he campaigned on, the Democrats are helping him do it. Good luck to the school children and school principals when bipartisanship comes their way. 

On the left-hand side of page one, “Meta will stop checking facts on social media. Shift ahead of Trump will depend on users to correct inaccurate and false posts.” In addition to denouncing efforts to contain misinformation and announcing that his content moderation operations would be moved to Texas to pander to people offended by the thought of Californians doing the work, Zuckerberg also carved out a set of exemptions to Facebook's policies on abusive language to remove protections that had covered LGBTQ people. “Ever since Donald J. Trump's victory in November, the Times writes, few big companies have worked as overtly to curry favor with the president-elect, who, during his first administration, accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices. In a series of announcements during this presidential transition period, Meta has sharply shifted its strategy in response to what Mr. Zuckerberg called a ‘cultural tipping point’ from the election.” 

On page A13, the Times checks in on what it calls a rambling hour long news conference yesterday in which the headline says “Trump hints at force to seize a canal and Greenland.” The canal would be Panama. Mr. Trump, the Times writes “repeatedly returned to the theme of American sacrifice in building the canal and accused China, falsely, of operating it today. When trust on the question of whether he might order the military to force Panama to give it up in violation of treaties and other agreements reached during the Carter administration, or to do the same with Greenland, ‘he said no, I can't assure you on either of those two.’” 

As Nicholas Grossman pointed out on Bluesky yesterday, this is something of a cursed dynamic, in his summary, “Mr. President, can you rule out [crazy thing]?

Normal president, thinking like a national leader, aims to reassure and avoid craziness in anticipation, says yes.

Trump, thinking like a TV producer, aims for current and future attention, says no.

People think asking him if he's going to invade Panama is going to establish some sort of bright line around whether or not he would invade Panama. But all it does is expand the fuzzy boundaries around his ongoing improvisations, and if after you float one of these hypotheticals you keep pressing him on it, you run the risk of convincing him that the idea is good for engagement. 

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 Max Scocca-Ho. Our podcasting work is sustained through the subscription dollars and tips, supplied by you our listeners. So please keep those coming, and if nothing more unforeseen than the usual daily apocalypses happens, we will talk again tomorrow.