Good morning. It is January 28th. It is another pleasant but still acceptably wintry morning in New York City. The winds will be gusting again, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The big story this morning is the suspension of self-government in the United States as Donald Trump announced yesterday, that he is simply illegally stopping an incomprehensibly broad swath of federal spending effective today, violating both the Impoundment Control Act and the underlying appropriation laws. The independent journalist Marissa Kabas got a hold of the memo announcing the move last night, sending the surviving oligopolists of the media industry scrambling to confirm it. The memo does not even try to create a lawful framework for a narrow suspension of spending within the particular legal limits for executive review, but instead proclaims a duty to align federal spending and action with the will of the American people, as expressed through presidential priorities, and says that “the use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and Green New Deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.” It's true that that is just the kind of raving you get in online comments from someone whose brain has been pickled by Facebook and Fox News. And it's true again that it is explicitly illegal and none of that matters in the least to any organization, state or foreign country that was due to receive, agree to bond federal money and now won't get it. Effectively, it appears to be a self-inflicted government shutdown, declared under a completely autocratic theory of how the federal government operates. Years ago, the well-funded anti-tax fanatic Grover Norquist declared his intention on behalf of his plutocrat paymasters to shrink the federal government down to the size where it could be drowned in the bathtub. And last night, size be damned, Donald Trump went ahead and shoved its head under the water. Because the media are the last to understand when a situation has changed, they're generally reporting this as a spending pause, which is the language the administration used, which grants the premise that whatever the hideous near-term disruptions are for the people who need the money, the Trump administration has made some reliable commitment to restoring the flow of money at some point. But Donald Trump has never in his life restored money, after he's decided to withhold it from someone who is supposed to get it, and to take him at his word that this is a temporary thing, in as much as that word can even be extracted from the rambling and blustering declaration of power in the document, is basic journalistic malpractice. All you can really say is that he said that the money is going to stop. Anything past that is speculation and willfully ill-informed speculation so far. 

Trump also last night put out an executive order ordering the Secretary of Defense to find ways to drive transgender people out of the military using an explicit argument that trans identity is inherently morally degenerate, expressing a false gender identity divergent from an individual's sex, the order says, cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual's sex conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one's personal life. A man's assertion that he is a woman and his requirement that others honor this falsehood is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member again this order about an honorable truthful and disciplined lifestyle, even in one's personal life, is to be implemented by newly confirmed defense secretary Pete Hegseth, whose defense against detailed charges of rape, was that he was simply carrying out consensually, one of his many adulterous affairs in a life of serial adultery and broken marriages, and who denies the specific detailed accounts from multiple people of his chronic public drunkenness on and off the job, yet promised that he would stop drinking in the event of his confirmation, conceding that his drinking habits were incompatible with the responsibilities of the job. This guy is going to be driving trans people out of the armed forces on the grounds of honor and self-discipline because the adjudicated rapist and convicted felon holding the office of commander-in-chief told him to. This is both blatant sex discrimination and straight-up gutter bigotry. And again, the legal system based on the clear text of existing law, will likely at some point step in and say that Trump can't actually do this, sometime after the purge has already begun. And before we move on, it's worth noting that while the language is crude and vile, the arguments are the same arguments that anti-trans, self-styled liberals have been making for the last couple of years, in the guise of just asking questions. Now, yet again, you have your answers.

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the weather box wildly diverges from the forecast on the phone. Talking about “cloudy with a snow shower,” while the morning outside remains blue and sunny. 

The lead news column is a news analysis story under four bylines. “Threatening 
His Enemies 
Yet to Come.” 

“Yet to come” appears to modify “enemies” rather than “threatening.” The subhead is “Trump Looks Ahead With Acts of Payback.”

“In his first week in office,” the Times writes, “President Trump made clear that his promises to exact revenge on his perceived enemies were not empty campaign pledges, and that his retribution is intended not just to impose punishment for the past, but also to intimidate anyone who might cross him in the future. By removing security protections from former officials facing credible death threats, he signaled that he was willing to impose potentially profound consequences on anyone he sees as having been insufficiently loyal.”

“That included his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who helped lead the pandemic response.” The broad strokes here that this is meant to warn anyone who chooses the law or the public interest over Trump's demands that they will be punished. But there's a weird and even more menacing loose end dangling from the story, which is how did Mike Pompeo, a florid goon for Trump in his first term, get on Trump's bad side?

He didn't even denounce the January 6th attack. As the earlier Times news story, about the decision to withdraw his protection, while he remains under credibly reported Iranian threat of assassination, put it, “Mr. Pompeo briefly considered running for president himself, and suggested that voters wanted solutions, not tweets, an oblique reference to Mr. Trump's use of social media for rapid fire posts. But that was about as far as the criticism went. Mr. Pompeo endorsed Mr. Trump in 2024 and was deeply critical of Joe Biden throughout his presidency. In an interview with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, Mr. Trump suggested Mr. Pompeo was the reason he did not release files about President John F. Kennedy's assassination during his first term. People who have spoken with Mr. Pompeo over the past six years were perplexed by that statement and said it wasn't based in fact. Nonetheless,” the Times wrote “Mr. Trump has told people he does not want anyone working for him who worked under Mr. Pompeo in his first term.” 

The second news column on the front page, well, yeah. So. The headline is, “Fast Escalation With Colombia Sent a Message / Trump Opts for Bluster Over Backchannels.” Here is the Times trying to use the print edition to put a little follow-up story down on an incident that missed the paper's print deadline Sunday night for Monday, the dispute between Trump and the president of Colombia about deportation flights. In the end, the Times writes “it took only about 12 hours for President Trump's first head-to-head confrontation with one of the United States' closest allies in Latin America, a blow up over Colombia's rejection of U.S. military flights to return illegal immigrants to result in a complete retreat by the target of Mr. Trump's threats. It wasn't much of a contest. Colombia depends on the United States for more than a quarter of its exports. And while the specifics of the dispute will probably be quickly forgotten, the rapid-fire threat by Mr. Trump to impose crushing tariffs and the quick surrender by President Gustavo Petro are likely to encourage Mr. Trump as he contemplates how to make use of the same weapon against new targets.” Then the story goes on to speculate about how Trump will bully Denmark to try to get control of Greenland. But before the specifics of this dispute, are quickly forgotten, let's take a look at a different follow-up story from Bloomberg. 

The headline there is “Trump's victory over Colombia now looks less clear cut. Colombia sends own planes to bring people home after showdown. Trump runs the risk of overuse of tariff sanctions threats. A deportation agreement with Colombia that the White House on Sunday night presented as a total victory for Donald Trump is looking less clear in the light of day. The Colombians the US tried to deport by military flights on Sunday will start traveling back to Colombia on Monday on the nation's own planes, according to the South American country's ambassador to the US. That's different than what the White House announced on Sunday night when press secretary Caroline Levitt said Colombia accepted ‘all of President Trump's terms, including on US military aircraft without limitation or delay.’ She made no mention of Colombia sending its own planes.” That is certainly an illuminating episode about how the Trump administration is going to handle foreign relations and about how that's going to play out in the press. 

This is where I usually say that is the news, but the news is an avalanche and that's just a—and that's just a few handfuls of snow. Thank you for listening. Good luck keeping up with the rest of it. 

The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe McLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep our podcasting going through your subscription dollars and tips. Please send more and thank you very much, and if nothing too unexpected happens, we'll talk again tomorrow.