Good morning. It is March 25th. It is bright and pleasant in New York City this morning, 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, which is already mutating into a meta story about how big it's going to be, is the news as reported in the Atlantic that as senior administration officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, prepared for the administration's attack on the Houthis in Yemen, they carried out their discussions of inherently classified military planning in a group chat on the commercially available app Signal, operating entirely outside the government's classified communications infrastructure and accidentally including Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic in the discussion. Goldberg wrote that he assumed that he was being targeted by some sort of elaborate hoax or misinformation campaign until shortly after the group said the bombing of Yemen had started and celebrated with various emojis. News reports confirmed that we had, in fact, started bombing Yemen. Most everybody involved here firmly held the position that Hillary Clinton should have been sent to prison for running her emails through a private server, although they also believe that Donald Trump was unjustly indicted for absconding with classified information himself. So principles wise, it was always going to be kind of a wash. Nevertheless, the use of Signal, complete with disappearing messages, seems like an obvious and intentional violation of record-keeping laws, and that degree of sloppiness with classified information likewise would be a major violation of the Espionage Act, and it's all a that the Secretary of Defense is a credibly accused alcoholic and hopeless lightweight whose only administrative experience was a complete debacle, and that the rest of them are crooks and buffoons, many of whom nevertheless did have enough government experience to know firsthand what the rules and the laws are about how and where to discuss sensitive military information, but who have embraced the administration's ethos of absolute contempt toward any sort of standards. Will any of this matter? 

The Democratic response so far is scattershot. Double digits worth of Democratic senators, after getting the news, went ahead and voted to confirm two more Trump administration Defense Department appointees, including a secretary of the Navy with no military experience at all. 

This morning's New York Times gives the headline, “Airstrike plan was disclosed in group text,” a single column just peeping above the fold on page one. 

The Fox news website, off in its own inscrutably sealed world, has a giant splash headline about a new illegal pipeline where illegal is not a normal straightforward adjective, but an adjective turned noun turned adjective. That is the pipeline is a metaphoric one, transporting the people, whom Fox News refers to as illegal, wait, I spoke too soon. When I went back to the Fox News website to check the subordinate placement of the story about the leak, it had jumped to the top of the page, thanks to the fact that today was a previously scheduled Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats to US security, which means Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe were already going to be there answering questions.

So now they can be asked about the group chat, without the laborious process of the Democrats getting their act together to demand a special hearing on it. And so Fox News gets to use a big red headline “Happening now. Top Intel officials testify on global threats amid fallout on National Security Text Leak.” Looks like a lot of people are finessing causation with constructions like amid fallout or after. There was going to be a hearing. Now there's a scandal.

Now to hearing about the Postmaster Louis DeJoy resigned yesterday, effective immediately. In the previous Trump administration, DeJoy appeared to be a private logistics mogul with a bean counting obsession who was generally hostile to the public and universal nature of the Postal Service. Now he's apparently too friendly to the Postal Service for whatever the Trump administration has planned next. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, besides the modest placement of the Houthi bombing group chat story, the lead column is “Musk in position to reap billions in US contracts. SpaceX stands to gain. A mogul's role in cutting costs opens the door to influence policy.” Me and the New York Times headline writers both flinging around “mogul” today. 

“Within the Trump administration's defense department,” the Times writes, “Elon Musk's SpaceX rocketry is being trumpeted as the nifty new way the Pentagon could move military cargo rapidly around the globe. In the Commerce Department, SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service will now be fully eligible for the federal government's $42 billion rural broadband push after being largely shut out during the Biden era. At NASA, after repeated nudges by Mr. Musk, the agency is being squeezed to turn its focus to Mars, allowing SpaceX to pursue federal contracts to deliver the first humans to the distant planet. And at the Federal Aviation Administration and the White House itself, Starlink satellite dishes have recently been installed to expand federal government internet access.” 

And all this is just the positive actions that Musk is steering his own way. A totally separate topic from how he is using his government cutting position to liberate himself from any regulatory oversight of his businesses and to punish the regulators who have tried to rein him in in the past. But for this particular piece of the story, it seems pretty effectively done. 

And maybe Ross Douthat should read it, given his bizarre choice over the weekend to write a column arguing that our emerging oligarchy is not an oligarchy at all. Writing of Musk. “We should take him at least somewhat seriously when he talks like a libertarian or debt crisis true believer. He's putting his net worth in the service of those ideas.rather than just leveraging power to increase his wealth.” Why do they pay Ross Douthat to publish lies in the newspaper? A fascinating question that would require too much runtime to fit into this podcast. 

The rest of the top of the front page is a full five column picture, a wide and tall image of a soldier standing as the caption says “on the bloodstained steps of the presidential palace in Khartoum, Sudan, where a missile killed four state TV workers and two military officers on Friday.” The accompanying story is, “In Khartoum’s Ruins, Signs of Shift in Civil War / As Government Retakes Capital’s Core, Peace Still Seems Far Off.” Even on this, where there are no U.S. partisan interests to be balanced, the Times sticks with its habit of writing bizarre and indirect headlines about moods and abstractions. 

The news, “government retakes capital's core” is subordinated into a modifier of a gassy clause about “peace seeming far off.” Likewise, the story begins with an anecdotal lead. “At the battle scarred presidential palace in the heart of Sudan's shattered capital, soldiers gathered under a chandelier on Sunday afternoon, rifles and rocket launchers slung over their shoulders, listening to their orders.” It's not even a narratively interesting anecdote. Troops are given orders. Only after that comes the news. “Since Sudan's military captured the presidential palace on Friday in a fierce battle that left hundreds dead, it has taken control of most of central Khartoum, marking momentous change of fortunes that is likely to change the course of Sudan's ruinous civil war.” Could have done without the double “changing” there. But ,news, something happened in the Sudanese civil war. 

Journalists for the New York Times, the story says, “were the first from a Western outlet to cross the Nile into central Khartoum or to visit the palace since the war erupted in April 2023. What we saw there made clear how decisively the events of recent days have shifted the direction of the war, but offered little hope that it will end soon.” Good reporting. So inherently good. You could just tee it up in inverted pyramid style. 

Next to that, in the leftmost column, comes a flatly bizarre piece of packaging. “GOP warms to more help for children” is the startling headline, startling because it's not true. That is, the story is about a poll in which members of the general public who identified as Republican joined independents and Democrats in saying that the federal government spends too little on programs that benefit children. That's nice, but the Republicans who organize and carry out the business of the Republican Party, the Trump White House, the congressional majorities, and the mega donors backing them, in no way reflect this policy preference, except for whatever JD Vance fantasizes about a targeted welfare state to encourage white people to breed.

Inside the paper on A17, there's a story of another Columbia student being hunted by ICE across campus. This one is Yunseo Chung, a legal permanent resident who moved to the United States at the age of seven and who the administration is trying to remove as inimical to U.S. interests because she reportedly distributed some flyers and took part in a demonstration outside a building where other students were holding a sit-in. “ICE officials,” the Times writes, “visited several residences on March 13th, called for help from federal prosecutors, and searched Ms. Chung's university housing. The involvement of federal prosecutors,” the Times writes, “was notable. Chung has filed a lawsuit against the administration, and the Times writes, according to Ms. Chung's lawsuit, agents apparently seeking her searched two residences on the Columbia campus with warrants that cited a criminal law known as the Harboring Statute aimed at those who shelter non-citizens present in the United States illegally.” She was not in the United States illegally, but the administration, apparently, now claims for itself the right to simply declare people illegal. 

And Columbia, having sicced law enforcement on its own student demonstrators last year, seems totally unprepared to do anything to resist the encroachment of the authorities on the campus now. Ivy League admissions decisions come out Friday. 

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. Continue sending those along if you can. And if nothing unexpected, gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.