Good morning. It is March 17th. It's evacuation day in Suffolk County, Massachusetts. If past is precedent, it's also going to be evacuation day in the gutters of Midtown and the back seats of taxicabs on a muggy, dripping day to hold in the smells. 

And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news.

Donald Trump went on social media when he should have been asleep last night and posted a rant purporting to declare that Joe Biden's pardons are void, vacant, and of no further force or effect because he wrote of the fact that they were done by auto pen. In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them, but more importantly, he did not know anything about them. The point of this particular conspiracy theory is for Trump to declare that the members of the House January 6th Select Committee, which in his full jabbering mad king phase, he insists on calling the unselect committee, should, he writes, fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level. 

And there's one more flat declaration of extra constitutional power in the service of Trump's illegal goals. Speaking of which, the Indignity Morning Podcast has been trying on Monday mornings to cut the New York Times as much slack as possible because of the difficulties of weekend publishing. But over the weekend, the Trump administration, after being explicitly ordered by a federal judge not to deliver deportation flights to El Salvador, even if it meant turning the planes around in the air, proceeded to go ahead and make the flights. I just said deportation, but there's no evidence that any of the people accused of being Venezuelan gang members had passed through deportation proceedings or any sort of due process before being abducted from the country and dragged off to a forced labor camp in El Salvador. Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, went on x.com to post a screenshot of a New York Post headline about the judge's order with the message, “oopsie, dot, dot, dot, too late,” and one of Elon Musk's favorite laugh cry emoji. This post, by the leader of a foreign country, gloating over the defiance of an American judge's order, was retweeted by the Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Trump administration's rapid response account on x.com also posted a video, dramatically lit and energetically cut, showing the captives being manhandled by legions of masked and armored guards, forced onto buses, forced off of buses delivered to the immense brand-new-looking prison facility, forcibly shorn of their hair and beards and locked up. 

The story of these acts of complete lawlessness and brutality by the highest levels of the American government is on page A10 at the bottom of the page in this morning's print New York Times. “Trump sends hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador, seemingly violating judge's order.”

“The Trump administration,” the story says, “has sent hundreds of Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador, pushing the limits of U.S. immigration law by carrying out the deportations seemingly after a federal judge ordered that the flights not proceed. The Trump administration,” the Times writes, “hopes that the unusual prisoner transfer deal, not a swap, but an agreement for El Salvador to take suspected gang members, will be the beginning of a larger effort to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to rapidly arrest and deport those it identifies as members of Tren de Aragua, without many of the legal processes common in immigration cases. The Alien Enemies Act,” the Times continues, allows for summary deportations of people from countries at war with the United States. The law, best known for its role in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, has been invoked three times in US history. During the War of 1812, World War I and World War II, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, American officials familiar with the deal said that the United States would pay El Salvador about $6 million to house the prisoners. Federal Judge James E. Boasberg on Saturday,” the Times writes, “said he did not believe federal law allowed the president's action and ordered that any flights that had departed with Venezuelan immigrants under Trump's executive order return to the United States, however that's accomplished, whether turning around the plane or not. ‘This is something you need to make sure is complied with immediately,’ he said.” 

Again, the news that a federal judge told the Trump administration that, and the Trump administration not only ignored him, but taunted him, is on page A10. 

Underneath the story, “Trump further decreases migrant flow at the border,” about how the brutality of Trump's approach to migration is delivering on his promise to seal the borders against new arrivals. 

What's on page one in the lead news spot, two columns wide is “Russia forces Ukraine out of Kursk territory once seen as leverage. Kiev's vast gains are reduced to a sliver.”

And below that, sharing space behind the same hairline. “Overcoming stigma, women unmask rape in Ukraine war. Experts say cases run into the thousands.” Valuable stories, terrible stories, stories of urgent importance, but stories for the left-hand side of the page, when the president of the United States spent the weekend overthrowing the basic premises of the Constitution. 

Also, you need to go to page A6 to find out that Trump bombed Yemen over the weekend. The headline is, “Houthi's promised retaliation after US airstrikes leave at least 31 dead in Yemen.” Not to be parochial and not to take anything away from our brave and now shockingly abandoned allies in Ukraine, but warfare by the United States seems like it would outrank warfare involving other countries. 

Certainly, if you're looking for space on page one, it would outrank “Champagne Region Frets Levy Will Wreak Havoc in the Hills / Threat of a 200 Percent Tariff From Bubbly’s Top Foreign Buyer.” Trade war is bad, but war war is worse.

At the top of the page is a four-column picture of trees stripped bare as telephone poles amid the wreckage of Tylertown, Mississippi, referring the reader to the coverage inside the paper of the storms that killed 37 people and counting across the country over the weekend. The lethal megastorm did make it onto the front page of the Sunday paper, so it is possible to break in to the weekend layouts when the news is big enough. 

Back on today's page one, there's a story about the effort by the pipeline company, Energy Transfer, to destroy Greenpeace through the lawfare. “With a lawsuit,” the paper writes, “that says Greenpeace enabled illegal attacks on its pipeline project and led a vast malicious publicity campaign that cost the company money.” Right. Costing fossil fuel companies money through publicity is the point. 

But, speaking of efforts to outlaw activism, below that, Mahmoud Khalil makes page one. Under the god-awful headline, “Activist Showed His Face. Then He Paid a Price.”  Paying a price signifies some kind of reciprocal cause and effect relationship. The reason Mahmoud Khalil showed his face was that all he was doing was exercising free speech rights for which the government, with essentially the acquiescence of Columbia University, decided to disappear him.

On page A13, in another part of the Columbia story, the Times covers the case of Ranaji Srinivasan, who fled to Canada when federal agents came to her university apartment after her student visa had been revoked, apparently on the grounds—if it rises to the level of grounds—that she failed to notify them that she had been arrested and then had the charges dropped after being mistakenly grabbed while walking past a mass roundup of student protesters.

That's just the sort of thing that happens now right here in the neighborhood. 

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 with your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those along if you can.

Watch out for ice. Watch out for lumpy green puddles, and if nothing unexpected gets in the way and the expected dishwasher delivery doesn't eat up too much time, we will talk again tomorrow.