Good morning. It is February 24th. It's sunny in New York City with warmth on the verge of uncanniness in the forecast as we speed toward the end of the shortest yet also somehow longest month. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Last night, President Donald Trump announced that he is appointing Dan Bongino a raving far-right podcaster as the deputy director of the FBI. Bongino is a former NYPD cop and secret service agent, but has zero experience in the FBI. He was banned by YouTube and dropped as an on-air personality by Fox. And the Wall Street Journal notes, lost three congressional races, two in Maryland and one in Florida, running as a Republican. “A vocal supporter of conservative candidates,” the Journal writes “Bongino once declared ‘my entire life right now is about owning the libs.’ Trump said Bongino would give up his podcast in order to serve,” the Journal writes, and then continues, “the announcement sent shockwaves through the FBI, whose new director, Patel, had offered Republican senators private assurances that he would name a special agent with bureau experience to be his deputy rather than a political outsider. Patel was sworn in at the White House on Friday. Hard to believe that the guy who lied in public under oath at his confirmation hearings was also less than honest with the senators behind closed doors. But there it is. 

The Washington Post reports that the measles outbreak in an under vaccinated swath of Texas and New Mexico is now up to 99 cases. The United States, the Post writes, “declared measles eliminated in 2000, meaning the disease had not spread domestically for more than 12 months. It credited the achievement to widespread immunization campaigns after the vaccine became available in 1963.” One more success for the project of revoking the 20th century. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that now the top 10 % of earners in America account for 49.7 % of all spending, a record the Journal writes “in data going back to 1989, according to an analysis by Moody's Analytics.” Three decades ago, they accounted for about 36%.

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news column is Germany's election. “GERMANS SWITCH TO CONSERVATIVE AS GROUND SHIFTS / FAR RIGHT 2ND IN VOTE / Merz Is Expected to Be
New Chancellor After Forming Coalition.” 

Next to it, undercutting the scarier implications of the headline stack, is a picture of the chancellor-to-be with the caption, “Friedrich Mertz, chairman of the Christian Democratic Union, has promised to never join with the far-right alternative for Germany.”

The Times, with its antennae out as ever for the emanations of the will of the folk, writes the results up as, “Germans voted for a change of leadership on Sunday, handing the most votes in a parliamentary election to centrist conservatives, with the far right in second, and rebuking the nation’s left-leaning government for its handling of the economy and immigration.” The Times is basically trying to build the coalition that Merz has disavowed, taking the results as the anti-immigrant right rebuking the left, rather than the establishment, holding on to cap the influence of the far right. A few paragraphs in, the story does note Mr. Merz, a businessman, was once seen as a potentially better partner for Mr. Trump, but in the campaign's final days, he mused about whether the United States would remain a democracy under Mr. Trump. He strongly condemned what Germans saw as meddling by Trump administration officials on behalf of the far right alternative for Germany or AFD. 

However, elsewhere on page one, and back on these shores, there's a remarkable shift in the Times' perception of the public mood. “Anger at Town Halls Hints at Broader Backlash” is the headline. “Republicans struggling to defend Trump's policy blitz.” It's a report on how conservative lawmakers in conservative districts are being yelled at in public meetings. It starts with Representative Pete Sessions being confronted by angry constituents at a town hall in Trinity, East Texaand then goes on to say that “in Trinity and in congressional districts around the country over the past week, Republican lawmakers returning home for their first recess since Mr. Trump was sworn in faced similar confrontations with their constituents. In Georgia, Representative Rich McCormick struggled to respond as constituents shouted, jeered, and booed at his response to questions about Elon Musk's access to government data. In Wisconsin, Representative Scott Fitzgerald was asked to defend the administration's budget proposals as voters demanded to know whether cuts to essential services were coming.”

The next part of the story is where the political landscape really shifts. “Many of the most vocal complaints came from participants who identified themselves as Democrats, but a number of questions pressing Mr. Sessions and others around the country came from Republican voters.” In the abstract, the second part of that should sound more significant, but the Times always takes Republican complaints to be authentic. Here, for once, they're acknowledging Democratic anger as legitimate, even to the extent of granting them the sort of excess courtesy generally only granted to Republicans. Reporting on the Pete Sessions event, the Times presents a question from the chairman of a county Democratic party about potential cuts to Social Security as a meaningful challenge that Sessions has to respond to. The tide will have really turned if the Times ever lets Democratic officials and operatives pass themselves off as regular citizens or maybe even as disaffected Republicans.

Down at the bottom of page one, Trump gets to test drive a new story to allow the American media to keep avoiding writing that he fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because the chairman was black. Now the story is not that General Charles Q. Brown Jr. was fired for his race, but that he was fired for talking about his race. “Floyd Killing Turned Trump Against 2 of His Top Generals” as the headline. The story notes that Trump gave no reason for firing Brown. But privately, the Times writes, “Trump advisors point to a video that General Brown recorded in the furious days after George Floyd, a black man, was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, an act that sparked a social justice movement. In the four minute video, General Brown reflected on his experiences as an African-American pilot in the Air Force.” Not sure what the value is in letting the administration officials go on background to deflect the obvious racist intent of Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hagseth, but that's how they're handling it. Also lumping in Brown with Trump's grudge against General Mark Milley, the previous Joint Chiefs chairman, who offended Trump by apologizing for appearing in uniform with Trump after Trump had violently cleared protesters from Lafayette Square. Taking together the two case studies do bracket the alarming significance of Trump's Friday night purge of the Defense Department.

Brown and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of the Navy, were fired as part of the administration's program of dismissing people who aren't white men as being presumptively unqualified and presumptively advocates of diversity, while Trump's ongoing anger at Milley for having balked after the fact at the military's presence in a show of force against protesters helps illuminate why the administration fired its top judge advocates general.

Next time around, they want to make sure there won't be any military lawyers to potentially get in the way. 

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 Socca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going. With your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips, please continue to send those along. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.