Good morning. It is April 2nd. It is a chilly 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. And once again, there's a lot of news going on. 

First of all, in Wisconsin yesterday, Elon Musk's attempt to buy the result of a state Supreme Court election failed in spectacular form as liberal judge Susan Crawford, whom he'd spent more than $20 million trying to defeat, romped to victory across the whole state. In Florida, Republicans did win two special elections to fill seats of Congress members who Trump either appointed or tried to appoint, in the case of Matt Gaetz, to his administration. But in both cases, the Republican margin declined from what it had been in November. Gaetz's former seat went from a 32-point win to a 24.6 point win and the seat formerly occupied by the person we now have to refer to as embattled national security advisor Mike Waltz went from a 33 point victory to a 14 point victory. 

In other unhappy news for Elon Musk, Tesla released its first quarter sales numbers, which CNN described as the largest drop in deliveries in its history by far. “Tesla reported” CNN writes “that it delivered 336,681 cars in the quarter compared to 386,810 in the first three months of last year. The Wednesday data represented the company's worst sales in nearly three years, a drop of 50,000 vehicles from a year ago. Tesla's share price plunged in pre-market trading, going pretty much straight down as soon as the news came up, then bounced partway back straight up as the meme forces backing the stock's valuation, appeared to reassert themselves.”

The latest law firm to capitulate to Donald Trump's extortion is Wilkie, Farr & Gallagher, which employs Kamala Harris's husband, Doug Emhoff. The price this time was $100 million worth of Trump-approved pro bono work. The New York Times reports, “according to a person briefed on the matter, Mr. Emhoff told the firm's leadership on Tuesday that they should not strike a deal with Mr. Trump and should instead fight it. At an event at Georgetown Law School shortly before the deal was announced on Tuesday, Mr. Emhoff said that lawyers should be prepared to step up and fight, according to the person. Mr. Emhoff said the rule of law and democracy were under attack, according to the person. Was that person Doug Emhoff?” 

In somewhat better supported anti-Trump speech making, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey yielded the Senate floor at last, last night after speaking against the administration for 25 hours and five minutes breaking the modern endurance record of 24 hours and 18 minutes set by Strom Thurmond in his racist filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Booker wrapped up with an exhortation in the name of the late John Lewis to cause good trouble. Senate Democrats then immediately granted unanimous consent to allow the nomination of Trump loyalist Matthew Whitaker as ambassador to NATO to go forward. But at least Senator Adam Schiff did put a hold on the nomination of acting DC US attorney Ed Martin, possibly the most strenuous public abuser of power in the entire administration so far to be officially seated in the position. 

US District Judge Dale Ho of the Southern District of New York, boxed in by the government's cynical request to terminate the criminal prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams, went ahead and dismissed the case this morning, but also threw out the Trump administration's scheme to hold the case over Adams as leverage, dismissing the charges with prejudice rather than without prejudice as the administration had requested. This means that Adams can never face federal charges for the apparent theft of more than a million dollars in state matching funds or for his wallowing in bribes from the government of Turkey, but he also can't be blackmailed by the administration, at least not about those charges. 

Today is the day that Donald Trump has designated as liberation day. That is the day that he unveils a new package of tariffs and sends the world spiraling deeper into trade war. He's gone over to his old pandemic era strategy of scheduling events for right after the market closes. So he's due to appear in the Rose Garden at 4 p.m. to say what the tariffs are, a matter that the White House press secretary told the press yesterday, the administration was still figuring out. Or, in her words, “perfecting it to make sure this is a perfect deal for the American people and the American worker.” 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news column is, “BONDI PURSUES DEATH PENALTY IN C.E.O. KILLING / ECHOING TRUMP’S PUSH / Prosecution of Mangione Demonstrates Shift in Federal Objectives.” 

“Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Times writes, said on Tuesday that she would seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, who was charged with murdering a United Health Care executive in Manhattan last year, part of a push to revive the widespread use of capital punishment in federal cases.” Little bit of a dangling modifier there as to whether Bondi or Luigi is the one pushing for capital punishment. This all seems like a bit of a narrow lens, though. It's certainly the case that Trump loves killing people, and that the Trump administration is full of people who are mad, that Joe Biden followed up the previous Trump Attorney General Bill Barr's campaign of rapid assembly-line state murder with a death penalty moratorium and the commutation of most federal death sentences, but the decision to go after Luigi Mangione seems more closely thematically related to Bondi's pursuit of terrorism charges against people who vandalize Teslas. 

And it's also just one more demonstration of how Mangione managed somehow to find the perfectly shaped seed to crystallize out the super saturated solution of malice and unreason in the American power structure. They're all absolutely unable to help themselves from turning him into either a martyr or a sensational opportunity for jury nullification. 

Next to that, the second news column is “Chaos Greets Federal Staff Back in Office / For Some, No Privacy and No Toilet Paper.” It's the broader survey view of the previous story about government psychologists being forced to try to do Zoom therapy out in the open. “The return of federal workers to the office has been,” as the Times writes, “marred by a lack of planning and coordination by the administration.” Imagine that. “Leading to confusion, plummeting morale, and more inefficiency. According to interviews with dozens of federal workers, most of whom would speak only on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. On March 17th,” the Times writes “when employees with the Food and Drug Administration returned to offices at the agency's White Oak campus outside Washington, parking was scarce and a line sneaked around the block with people waiting to get through security. Soon bathrooms ran out of toilet paper and paper towels. The cafeteria had not stocked enough food and there were not enough office supplies. And that was just a fraction of the problems.” 

Down at the bottom of the page, the headline is “Despite Trump-Friendly Tack, Harvard Faces Threat of Cuts.” The story describes how, before the Trump administration's Monday announcement that it was going to try to take $9 billion in funding away from Harvard, the school had “moved cautiously, seeking compromise, and, critics said, cracking down on speech. As President Trump's inauguration approached,” the Times writes, Harvard hired Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with deep ties to Mr. Trump. On the first full day of the Trump presidency, the university announced it was adopting a highly debated definition of anti-Semitism, which labeled certain criticisms of Israel, such as calling its existence racist, as anti-Semitic, a move encouraged by the new administration but slammed by free speech advocates. As the spring went on,” the Times continues, “pro-Palestinian actions spurred campus-wide messages, even as Harvard remained quiet when a former Israeli prime minister visited and joked about giving student hecklers pagers, said Ryan Anis, a Harvard political science professor. The comment was an apparent reference to the exploding pagers Israel used to target Hezbollah last fall. Under pressure, Harvard recently suspended a partnership with a Palestinian university while agreeing to start a new partnership with an Israeli one. Then last week, two leaders of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies were pushed out of their positions after a Jewish alumni group complained about programming, according to faculty members. To some faculty members, they move with more evidence that Harvard was capitulating at a moment of creeping authoritarianism.”

The story ends with Professor Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School saying, “sometimes people who are eager for the university to get up and make big statements have a slightly unrealistic conception of what the real world effect of those statements would be.” Whereas the real world effect of not making those statements so far looks like a pending $9 billion hole in the budget and open-ended coercion to come. 

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 through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those in, please, if you can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.