Good morning. It is March 27th. It is opening day, the real one, not the fake overseas exhibition baseball one. It's a bright and cold 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. 

Kerry Lake, Donald Trump's advisor to the U S agency for global media, put out a letter this morning. De-defunding Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, restoring the grant money that she had previously tried to cut off. Yesterday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order keeping Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty open as the organization established as an independent entity by Congress pursued a lawsuit to stop the Trump administration from unilaterally shutting it down. As of this morning, the administration's position is that by restoring the grant money. It has mooted the legal action and the whole case should go away, which sounds good as long as you don't compare it to the Trump administration's record of telling judges that they're going to do one thing and then doing another So it's a victory for an entity that decided to fight its defunding rather than simply rolling over. 

And in other news about not putting up with the administration's nonsense, Vice presidential spouse Usha Vance and national security advisor Mike Waltz have all but abandoned their plan to take a colonialist real estate open house tour of Greenland. Waltz one of the driving forces behind the administration's discussion of war plans in an insecure group chat that included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg may or may not still be going on the trip, but rather than seeing the sights of the autonomous country, which Donald Trump insists on wanting to pry away from Denmark, the Vances and whoever else is in the delegation will confine their visit to an existing American Space Force base there. 

Andrew Tate, the misogynist online personality and accused sex criminal whose freedom to travel from Romania pending a court case there was secured by the Trump administration, has been accused of a new sex crime. TMZ reports that his girlfriend told Beverly Hills police that he choked her and sexually assaulted her at a hotel there. Tate is back in Romania with his brother Tristan this week for a mandatory legal check-in. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the Houthi PC small group Signal Chat dominates the right-hand side of the page. The rightmost column is a news analysis piece about the Trump administration's efforts to downplay what happened. “Effort to FogThe Dangers A Leak Posed,” the metaphorically challenged headline says. “War Plan or Not, It Risked Aiding a Foe.” 

“The White House effort to defend Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday,” the Times writes, “leaned heavily into a semantic argument. What he posted on the now infamous Signal Chat with his national security colleagues, President Trump, Mr. Hegseth, and other administration officials insist was not a war plan.”

“Technically, they were right.” The Times writes, “what the Atlantic published from the chain in which its top editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently included is more like a timeline of a pending attack. But it is so detailed with the time that F/A-18F Super Hornet jets were supposed to launch and the time that MQ-9 Reaper drones would fly in from land bases in the Middle East that the answer may prove a distinction without a difference.” 

Next to that, three columns wide is a graphic annotating a section of the chat with a quote from Hegseth, “Nobody was texting war plans,” on the left, as well as a transcript of part of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's testimony before the Senate in which she was asked, “precise operational issues were not part of this conversation,” and she replied, “correct.” Right next to the part of the chat that says that 1415 Eastern Time is “when the first bombs will definitely drop.” After the jump, the news analysis story says, “national security veterans say it is almost farcical to argue that this was not classified data, at least when Mr. Hegseth sent details of the plan to the group chat. It was so sensitive that in most administrations, it would even be kept off most classified systems. The debate that played out over Signal,” the Times writes, “would typically be confined to the situation room with just a few officials dialing in from secure locations over especially protected government owned lines.” 

Sharing space with the jump on that page  A16 are, “At house hearing on threats Democrats zero in on signal chat blunder, Republicans on the committee, all but ignored the leak.” 

And below that “Senate Democrats press president for answers on egregious security breach, pushing back as the white house plays down an incident.” 

On page A7. There's a big story about how this is just the latest piece of bungling from the chronically bungling Hegseth, and below that, taking up the rest of the page, is a piece about how much trouble Waltz may or may not be in. 

“Most of the Republican Party has leaped to Mr. Waltz's defense,” the Times writes, “seeking to blame the news media for the uproar. But, in interviews, several close allies of the president characterized the national security advisor’s standing as precarious, more so than it already was when the New York Times reported on his uneasy status over a week ago.”

“Those who discussed Trump administration views on Mr. Waltz did so on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. His fate, they say, rests on Mr. Trump's caprices, with several competing factors coming into play. On one hand,” the Times writes, “it is Mr. Trump's nature to defy a media firestorm rather than try to quell it by offering up a sacrificial lamb. He parted from this tendency at the beginning of his first administration when he fired his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, for not divulging his encounters with Russian officials to the FBI. According to one advisor from that era, Mr. Trump soon regretted that act of acquiescence. This time around,” the Times continues, “according to several people who have spoken to Mr. Trump over the first two months of his term, he wants to avoid firing people because of the narrative of chaos that it will quickly engender. ‘Once he starts firing people,’ one person familiar with his thinking said, ‘it will be very hard to draw a line if problems arise with other aides down the line.’”

It's true once you start getting rid of Trump administration officials for malfeasance or incompetence or sheer comprehensive unfitness, it would be very hard to stop. 

Next to the chat coverage at the top of page one is the news that seven members of the Supreme court agreed that a box full of ghost gun parts that can be assembled into a working firearm in a short amount of time counts as a firearm and can be regulated as such. “Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, included photographs,” the Times writes, “unusual in court opinions, to illustrate how one of the gun kits, Polymer80's Buy Build Shoot, came with all of the necessary components to build a Glock-style semi-automatic weapon. He wrote that it was so easy to assemble that it could be put together in about 20 minutes. ‘Plainly, the finished Buy Build Shoot kit is an instrument of combat,’ justice Gorsuch wrote, adding that ‘no one would confuse the pistol with a tool or a toy.’”

Well, no one except Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who insisted that just because all the pieces of a working firearm were there in the box for ready assembly, that didn't make it a firearm. Gorsuch countered that argument by comparing buying the gun in the box to buying a table from Ikea, where everyone agrees that the product is a table, even if you're going to have to fiddle around with a hex wrench before you can eat your dinner off it.

And in the leftmost column is Trump's announcement that he's going to put a 25 % tariff on imported cars and imported car parts. 

Down at the bottom of page one is an obituary of Oleg Gordievsky, identified in the headline as “Soviet agent, Western mole and global rescuer.” Back in an earlier day of a senile president saying whatever threatening things might pop into what was left of his mind, Gordievsky's position as a double agent played a crucial role in preventing what could have become World War III. “By the early 1980s,” the Times writes, “the Soviets were convinced that the United States was planning a first strike nuclear attack under the guise of a major NATO exercise, a suspicion underlined by President Ronald Reagan's bellicose rhetoric. As NATO carried out the exercise, known as Able Archer 83, the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies moved on to a war footing. Historians consider this to have been the closest moment to World War since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. “Mr. Gordievsky,” the Times writes, “was in a unique position to work both sides. He was able to persuade Moscow that an attack was not, in fact, imminent, while also communicating Soviet fears to the British and the Americans. As a result, Margaret Thatcher and Mr. Reagan pared back their language and future military exercises were more limited.”

So as long as Donald Trump pays attention to his intelligence briefings, we should be fine. 

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 are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we'll talk again tomorrow.