Good morning. It is March 5th. It is a cloudy, gusty, and warmish morning in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The Supreme Court ruled this morning in a court case about the Trump administration's unilateral cutoff of USAID funding that the president cannot simply withhold $2 billion of payments to government contractors for work that they have already completed. The decision, again, saying that the president cannot refuse to pay out congressionally appropriated funds to people who have completed the work that the government agreed to pay for, was five to four. Four Supreme Court justices, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, writing for them all, refused to hold the president to even that rock bottom level of accountability to the plain requirements of the Constitution and the law. 

Last night was Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress. The speech by an incoming president that doesn't count as the State of the Union, despite matching the format and role of the State of the Union address, save only the magical incantation where he says what the State of the Union is. This was the longest such speech on record as tracked, according to PBS, by the American Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara, which has tracked speech length since President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Trump went on for an hour and 40 minutes, breaking, PBS writes, the previous record set by President Bill Clinton's 2000 State of the Union address, which ran one hour, 28 minutes and 49 seconds. A little bit of Trump's excess runtime was the result of 77-year-old Texas Representative Al Green standing up, brandishing a golden-headed cane and shouting at Trump that he had no mandate to cut Medicaid until House Speaker Mike Johnson had him removed from the chamber. A few other Democrats staged quiet and basically unnoticed walkouts. Others held up little protest signs or dressed in various color-coded protest colors, but mostly they just sat there meekly while Trump assailed trans people and immigrants told spectacular lies about basically everything, ranted about Joe Biden, calling him the worst president in history, and at one moment just swept his pointing finger over the politely sitting Democrats while talking about radical left lunatics. 

Despite his underlings' various efforts yesterday to convince the stock market that the full-on trade war Trump launched was going to be some kind of transient event, he went on and on, redundantly, and at considerable length about his plans to keep imposing tariffs. He probably said a dozen other things that in any other political era would have triggered either impeachment or the 25th Amendment. He declared his intention to seize Greenland by any means necessary, as his chortling vice president leaped to his feet behind him to celebrate the threat. But mostly he just jabbered, dipping in and out of the bloodthirsty true crime stories presumably written into the script by Stephen Miller in between long digressions and complaints of the kind that had even his most loyal followers bailing out of his rallies during the campaign. He kept striking poses that were meant to look like a sassy or confiding lean, but seemed more like him cantilevering himself and clutching the lectern because he can't really stand upright for that long.

Oh, and he also flatly declared that Elon Musk is the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, contradicting on live television the claims that the administration's lawyers have been making in court. Any month now, someone will surely face the consequence for that. 

The cameras also caught him on his way out of the chamber, patting Chief Justice John Roberts on the back and saying, thank you again, thank you again, I won't forget. 

Relatedly, Wired wrote yesterday, guests are paying millions of dollars to dine and meet with President Donald Trump at special events held at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

“Business leaders,” Wired writes, “can secure a one-on-one meeting with the president at Mar-a-Lago for $5 million, according to sources with direct knowledge of the meetings. At a so-called candlelight dinner held as recently as this past Saturday, prospective Mar-a-Lago guests were asked to spend $1 million to reserve a seat, according to an invitation obtained by Wired. There are many other things that Trump could thank the Roberts Court for, including just the degree of interference it used to keep him from going to trial on federal charges before the election, but these multi-million dollar cash grabs are not the dominant story across multiple media outlets because the Roberts court has worked tirelessly through the years to define the crime of bribery out of existence while several of its members take bribes themselves and followed that up by granting the president absolute immunity in his official actions. 

So if you go to a candlelight dinner and hand Donald Trump a sack of money, and ask him to do something for you, and he does it, as long as he's abusing the powers of his office to do it, no one may even inquire as to whether the bag of money was what motivated him. 

ProPublica reports that Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, who dropped her opposition to Pete Hegseth's nomination to be Secretary of Defense, despite her role as an advocate for victims of sexual assault and the detailed sexual assault complaint against Pete Hegseth, has allegedly had romantic relationships with two different legislative advocates for branches of the armed forces, essentially lobbyists in uniform. “Ernst and the officials were not married at the time,” ProPublica writes, “and Senate rules do not bar lawmakers from entering into romantic relationships with lobbyists or other legislative advocates. But ethics experts say such relationships can create a conflict of interest, and other lawmakers have been criticized for such behavior in the past.” 

The New York Times reports that the Trump administration is “threatening to cut tens of millions of dollars in federal funding for Columbia University, making the school the first major target in its effort to root out what it considers antisemitic harassment on college campuses,” what it considers anti-Semitic harassment is pro-Palestinian protesting, and this is Columbia's reward for sending the cops in against its student protesters and doing whatever else it could think of to appease the McCarthyite pro-war crimes attacks on student expression. How could they possibly have seen this one coming? 

On the front of the print edition of the New York Times, trade war news dominates. There's a four-part picture grid of strawberries in the field, avocados on the conveyor belt, lumber in construction, and retail shoppers riding an escalator. Next to a two-column headline, “CANADA AND CHINA HIT BACK AT TRUMP WITH OWN TARIFFS.”

The right hand column underneath is “economic upheaval for US is feared.” Once again, there's the Times's characteristic retreat into feelings to write the news. “Sweeping tariffs imposed by President Trump threatened economic upheaval for consumers and businesses in the United States on Tuesday, as the country's biggest trading partners struck back, raising fears of an escalating trade war.” As far as claims about abstractions go, what do you accomplish epistemologically by going with “raising fears of an escalating trade war” instead of just “escalating the trade war?” Maybe people are afraid. Maybe they're making rational adjustments to the disruption of what their former underlying expectations of trade had been. Why bother putting it at a degree of remove? 

The left-hand column is “Pressure Drives Pride
in ‘Made in Mexico,’” about how Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum is trying to rally the country to its economic self-defense, an extremely natural and predictable result of Trump's decision to launch economic hostilities. 

Next to that, the Times goes vibes hunting among the American public and comes away with the most cowardly and empty vibes assessment in American politics. The mustiest cliche of non-conclusion. “In Swing District, Cautious Optimism on Trump.” 

Going further afield on page A10, the Times dropped in on the Putin Cafe in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, an enclave of Serbs still angry that the West prevented them from exterminating their Muslim neighbors. They are with Trump. 

Whereas down at the bottom of the page, the people at the Trump Pizza Station Cafe in Kiev are not happy with how things are going. 

On page A14, pro wrestling impresario and accused sex trafficker Linda McMahon, the Trump administration's secretary of education, is trying to kill off the department of education. 

Down at the bottom of the page, Pete Hegseth is “moving to terminate Pentagon offices and positions that focus on preventing and responding to civilian harm during U.S. combat operations,” the Times writes, “according to three defense officials.”

On page A19, the Times reports that the new head of the Food and Drug Administration Division that regulates infant formula was in recent months a corporate lawyer defending a top formula maker from claims that its product gave rise to debilitating harm to premature babies. “Kyle A. Diamantas,” the Times writes, “joined the FDA last month to lead the food division, leaving the law firm Jones Day, which has served as a pipeline of talent to both Trump administrations. As a partner in Jones Day's Miami office, Mr. Diamantas' recent work included defending Abbott Laboratories in a lawsuit accusing the company of failing to adequately warn parents that its specialized formula for premature infants was associated with an elevated risk of a deadly bowel condition. Abbott lost the case and was ordered to pay $495 million. Abbott is appealing the verdict.” 

And on page A18, The Times reports that seven people have died so far during the Wildcat prison guard strike in New York. The strikes, The Times writes, “started on Feb. 17, after officers assigned to two upstate prisons, Collins Correctional Facility and Elmira Correctional Facility, walked off the job.
Their stated reason was opposition to a 2022 law that placed strict limits on the use of solitary confinement, a measure the correction officers’ union said led to unsafe working conditions for guards. As an example,” the Times writes, “they held up an incident that had occurred five days earlier at Collins, where inmates reportedly took over a housing facility.
Evidence has since emerged,” the Times continues, “to suggest that at least some of the guards involved may have allowed the prisoners to take over, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
“The incident is under investigation by the state police.” 

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. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Please continue sending those along if you can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we'll talk again tomorrow.