Good morning. It is April 8th. It is a bright, wintry 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 people investing in the markets seem to have absorbed or decided to ignore their knowledge of the imminent threat of Donald Trump's trade war. Japan's Nikkei index shot up 6 % when it opened and stayed there through the day. London's FTSE is up 2.5 % and Dow Jones futures are up nearly 3%. Have the people who were sending prices zigzagging in a panic yesterday settled into complacency? And if so, why? 

Indignity extends its condolences and apologies to the University of Houston men's basketball team. I did not mean to cast a pall on their future by praising their performance in the national semifinals in yesterday's newsletter. But last night, the University of Florida basically did to Houston what Houston did to Duke, trailing them nearly all the way, falling behind by double digits and then clamping down defensively to pull out a victory in the end game. Real blame goes to Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who ignored warnings about being a human bad luck charm and inflicted himself on San Antonio's Alamodome for the championship game. Congratulations to the Florida Gators. 

The Supreme Court yesterday, by a five to four margin, threw out the restraining order against the Trump administration's program of mass renditions to El Salvador and declared that if people have been wrongfully abducted and sent away to a Salvadoran torture prison, all they have to do is individually, one by one, get in touch with their lawyers, from Salvadoran torture prison, and file personal habeas corpus petitions, not in DC, where the policy is being made, but in the lawless far-right federal courts of Texas. Except that the Trump administration maintains that by subcontracting out these people's confinement to El Salvador, they have removed them from the reach of US law. So all you have to do about your deportation is travel back in time to before you were deported and get a hostile judge to take your petition, while everyone else piling out of the time machine is trying to do the same. 

The decision, along with another order from Chief Justice John Roberts, that delayed a court order requiring the Trump administration to bring back Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man who even the Trump administration admits was taken away wrongfully, effectively gives the Trump administration an indefinite pass on facing any reckoning for its various refusals to honor orders from lower court judges.

In more successful strategies against the Trump administration, the state of New York has gotten the supposed deadline for eliminating congestion pricing pushed back to October by simply refusing to cooperate with the March 21st deadline put forth by transportation secretary and former MTV reality star Sean Duffy. The front of this morning's New York Times is dominated by a package of tariff stories.

Under the five column headline, “Trade War Cascades From Europe to Asia to the Gulf Coast.” The lead column is “Nations Scramble to Sway Trump on Tariffs.” 

“President Trump's plan to impose tariffs on most of America's trading partners,” the Times writes, “has governments across the globe racing to schedule phone calls, send delegations to Washington and offer up proposals to lower their import taxes in order to escape the levies. On Monday, European officials offered to drop tariffs to zero on cars and industrial goods imported from the United States, in return for the same treatment. Israel's prime minister was expected to personally petition Mr. Trump on Monday in meetings at the White House. Vietnam's top leader in a phone call last week offered to get rid of tariffs on American goods while Indonesia prepared to send a high level delegation to Washington to directly negotiate with the U.S. government. Mr. Trump and his advisors,” the Times writes, “have given mixed signals on whether the United States is willing to negotiate.”

On Truth Social this morning, Trump posted that he had talked to the acting president of South Korea and, “We have the confines and probability of a great DEAL [all caps] for both countries. Their top TEAM [all caps] is on a plane heading to the U.S., and things are looking good.” This not quite policy announcement, delivered on social media, with the usual random capitalizations and a swipe at Sleepy Joe Biden included in the text, was apparently what passes for reassuring to the people who are trading stocks. 

Next to the Times' negotiations story, under a picture of an electric car factory in China, they found one set of people who think they're going to win under tariffs. “Struggling Shrimpers See the ‘Sun Coming Out’ / Pummeled by Cheaper Imports, Disasters and Fuel Costs.” It opens with a Mississippi shrimp fisherman having bought a bigger and better boat in anticipation of the new opportunities that could come from trade war against the countries that export cheap shrimp. The problem of cheap shrimp and the environmental degradation and worker enslavement that go with it is a real one. It's also one that seems amenable to all sorts of targeted regulation rather than just blowing up the entire Vietnamese garment industry to get at the shrimp farmers. But at least the Gulf Coast shrimp farmers have something to look forward to, unless they don't. “Some shrimpers,” Times writes “readily acknowledged the broad uncertainty around Mr. Trump's tariffs and their effect. The policy could make other aspects of their work and life more difficult. If the cost of their equipment rises, for example, or the aluminum and steel needed to repair their boats becomes more expensive.” 

On the far side of the trade barriers, the other piece of the three story package is “China’s Exports Gaining Steam Like ‘Tsunami,’” Tsunamis being famously full of steam. The steam itself is actually made out of, among other things, automobiles. “For decades, the world's largest car factory,” the Times writes, “was Volkswagen's complex in Wolfsburg, Germany. But BYD, the Chinese electric car maker, is building two factories in China, each capable of producing twice as many cars as Wolfsburg. Recent data from China's central bank,” the Times writes, “shows that state-controlled banks lent an extra $1.9 trillion to industrial borrowers over the past four years. On the fringes of cities all over China, new factories are being built day and night, and existing factories are being upgraded with robots and automation. China's investments and advances in manufacturing are producing a wave of exports that threatens to cause factory closings and layoffs, not just in the United States, but also around the globe. ‘The tsunami is coming for everyone,’ said Catherine Tai, who was the United States trade representative for former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.”

Don't worry, we're not getting any cheap, high-quality electric cars out of it. Chinese companies, the Times writes, “still sell almost no cars in the United States. That is unlikely to change. With Mr. Trump's latest moves, Chinese carmakers now face U.S. tariffs as high as 181%. Blocked in the United States, Chinese automakers have continued building factories and have pivoted their export campaigns elsewhere. Their sales have soared in Australia and Southeast Asia, taking market share from Japanese and American brands. In Mexico, Chinese carmakers held just 0.3 % in 2017. By last year, it was over 20%.” 

The one remaining news column at the top of the page is a NEWS ANALYSIS. “Trump Uses Many Paths For Payback / His Campaign Blurs Personal and Political.”

“When President Trump returned to office,” the Times writes, “his rivals and law enforcement officials feared he would follow through on his pledges to use the Justice Department and FBI to investigate and even imprison his perceived enemies. But since winning re-election, Mr. Trump's retribution campaign has turned out to be far more expansive, efficient, and creative than anticipated. It has also been less reliant on the justice system.” 

Is that use of “but” really accurate? Using the justice system to lock people up takes a while. And the Trump Justice Department has adopted a position of full, open, unquestioning loyalty to his personal priorities that makes splitting hairs about how exactly he's going to abuse the legal system seem kind of beside the point. 

As the story says, “not only has he found new ways to use his power to target those he has demonized, but his actions, or just the prospect of them, have led some of those he has gone after to change their behavior and fall into line. Mr. Trump has employed tactics including lawsuits, executive orders, regulations, dismissals from government jobs, withdrawal of security details, and public intimidation to take on a wide range of individuals and institutions he views as having unfairly pursued him or sought to block his agenda. In the process, he has blurred the personal and the political, making it difficult in some instances, like his targeting of academic and cultural institutions, to distinguish between his grievances and policy goals.” That's a little excessively polite, but the gist is pretty much correct. 

Down below the fold, there's more on the Israeli massacre of 15 Palestinian emergency rescue workers, along with the previously reported video of Israelis shooting up a bunch of ambulances and a fire truck that had their emergency lights on, there's now testimony from two separate eyewitnesses who were being held by the Israeli troops at the time the killing took place. “The video and the witnesses accounts,” the Times writes, “contradict the Israeli military's initial explanation for the attack, which was that its forces had opened fire on the emergency vehicles because they were advancing suspiciously without headlights or emergency signals. On Saturday,” the story notes “an Israeli military official told reporters That the military's initial version of events had been partly ‘mistaken.’ The military said in a statement on Sunday that the episode was under thorough examination.” 

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