Good morning. It is April 14th. One more day to get the paperwork together. It is a cloudy 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. 

Where to begin? An intruder set fire to the Pennsylvania governor's mansion on Saturday night. Governor Josh Shapiro and his family had to be evacuated. The person reportedly jumped the fence, broke into the dining room, and set off beer bottles full of gasoline. The man arrested for the intrusion was also, the AP reports, carrying a small sledgehammer, which police say he told them he planned to beat the governor with if he encountered him. The AP reports that he's now in the hospital, being treated, according to police, for something that is not connected to this incident or his arrest, which seems possibly inaccurate, depending on what you mean by connected. His mother, the story says, told the Associated Press on Monday that she had tried in recent days to get him assistance for mental health issues, but nobody would help. She said her son had bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The AP was not able to verify that information. “He wasn't taking his medicine and that's all I want to say,” the AP quotes her as saying, The Washington Post reported yesterday on the case of Rumeysa Ozturk that, as the Post wrote,

“Days before masked ICE agents detained Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk to deport her, the State Department determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in anti-Semitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, as the government has alleged.” 

And that connects grimly with a report by the University of Michigan professor Don Moynihan in his newsletter that the language the Department of Homeland Security used in calling for revoking Ozturk's visa matched word for word an accusation against her on the anonymous anti-Palestinian vigilante site Canary Mission, which said Rumeysa Ozturk engaged in anti-Israel activism in March 2024 in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israelis on October 7th, 2023. The word “engaged” on the Canary Mission site was a hyperlink leading to the op-ed she co-authored in the student newspaper supporting a campus divestment resolution. So that is end to end the entire case against her. Anonymous extremists complained to the government about her very straightforward exercise of core First Amendment rights. And as a result, she is now locked up in a Louisiana detention facility facing deportation. 

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the person who has extorted hundreds of millions of dollars worth of promised pro bono services from leading law firms on the Trump administration's behalf is Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Boris Epstein. The Journal writes, “who has been indicted in Arizona on charges related to Trump's 2020 election loss.” Citing lawyers at seven of the firms and White House officials, The Journal writes, “in a series of meetings and phone calls, Epstein has extracted large commitments of pro bono work for Trump-supported causes and changes to the law firm's hiring practices to Trump's preferences.” 

Meanwhile, just now, in a press event in the Oval Office, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele joined with Donald Trump and various Trump officials to put on a show of pure contempt of court, laughingly rejecting the idea of complying with the court order to return the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia from Bukele's torture prison in El Salvador. Bukele called him a terrorist and asserted “I don't have the power to return him to the United States.” Trump then called the reporters who'd asked “sick people.” I hadn't ever really imagined that living under a dictatorship that claimed the power to throw people into prison with no hearing and no recourse at the whim of the executive would also involve so many people behind it professing that actually they don't have any power to do anything at all. Anybody can throw you into prison but there isn't anyone at all who's able to let you out. 

In a pettier act of naked contempt by a pettier kind of tyrant, Hellgate reports that Andrew Cuomo, the Westchester man and accused sex pest running for the mayorship of New York City, put out a housing policy plan that included a citation to chat GPT, various weird typos, and stretches of unintelligible syntax. The Cuomo campaign denied using a large language model to write the text of the report, claiming the errors were introduced instead through the use of speech recognition technology to compose it. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, which as the first paper after the weekend, stands as a sort of time capsule of what the worst things in the world were 72 hours or so ago, the lead story, two columns wide, is “Trump Tariffs Shake Faith In the Safety of U.S. Bonds / Long Seen as a Sure Bet in Global Finance,
Treasuries Now Reflect Uncertainty.” There's a case to be made that even more recent and shocking events Don't really dethrone that as the biggest potential news story out there. “There are,” the Times writes “not many certainties in the world of money, but this traditionally has been one of them when life turns scary people take refuge in American government bonds. Investors buy us treasuries,” the Times continues, “on the assumption that come what may, financial panic, war, natural disaster, the federal government will endure and stand by its debts, making its bonds the closest thing to a covenant with the heavens. Yet the turmoil in bond markets last week revealed the extent to which President Trump has shaken faith in that basic proposition, challenging the previously unimpeachable solidity of U.S. government debt.” And as the nation charges onward, like Wiley Coyote confidently sprinting off the cliff, the thing is that there's absolutely no way out of the underlying situation. No matter what happens, this will always henceforth be the country that elected Donald Trump twice. And anyone who would invest in the country will now forever know that they're putting their money into a system that is capable of doing something as stupid as reelecting Trump. That is who or what we are, as a country and why would anyone pin their financial future to our financial future? 

Below that on the right hand side of the page right at the fold the headline is “From a Cell, a Russian Scientist Feels a Chill Sweeping the U.S..” It's by the incomparable Ellen Barry and it's the story of how the Harvard Medical School researcher Kseniia Petrova ended up in a crowded detention facility in Louisiana after as the story says customs officials detained her at Logan International Airport in Boston for failing to declare samples of frog embryos she had carried from France at the request of her boss at Harvard. Such an infraction is normally considered minor, punishable with a fine of up to $500. Instead, the customs official canceled Ms. Petrov's visa on the spot and began deportation proceedings. She had left Russia because she would not refrain from criticizing Vladimir Putin and because she opposed the war in Ukraine and now she's caught in an arbitrary crackdown by the government here. The story says “Marina Sakharov-Lieberman, the granddaughter of the Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, has been following the case from her home in London. She said it was extraordinary that Harvard had not more publicly protested Ms. Petrova's detention and demanded her release. ‘That is something that I would expect in Russia,’ she said. ‘Everyone would be afraid. If someone was disappeared, the institutions would be silent. Very few people would raise their voices and risk their positions.’” 

And right next to that story on page one is a photograph of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer trying to hide her face behind folders in the Oval Office after being brought in for what she thought was a one-on-one meeting and turned out to be a press event with Donald Trump. The headline is, “For Democrats Risky Forays into the Oval Office. Governors Who Seek a Relationship Walk a Delicate Line.”

“The Whitmer episode,” the Times writes, “was the result of a remarkable attempt at reconciliation between Ms. Whitmer and Mr. Trump, who dismissed her in 2020 as ‘that woman from Michigan’ during a clash over his administration's pandemic response. The day after the inauguration,” the Times writes, “Ms. Whitmer penned a handwritten letter, which has not been previously reported, congratulating Mr. Trump, saying she looked forward to working together and praising his support for the auto industry in his first address, according to a person who relayed the text of the letter. Ms. Whitmer included her cell phone number and invited Mr. Trump to call her if she could be of any help to him. The outreach worked for her,” the Times writes, “but it came at a cost.” How did it work for her? We're not even three months into the Trump administration and he just destroyed her political career. She was a model for assertive democratic leadership in a swing state, and now she's folder-face lady. “Her whipsaw experience with Mr. Trump, the Times writes, illustrates the political risks that democratic governors face as a small group of them try to cultivate relationships with a president reviled by their party, but in control of vast amounts of federal funding for states. These governors, exemplified by Ms. Whitmer, but also including Gavin Newsom of California, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, and Kathy Hochul of New York, have met with the president in the Oval Office, fielded his phone calls, and toned down their language toward him. Many Democrats see Mr. Trump as a transactional politician who is susceptible to flattery and are acutely aware of how he has sought to punish liberal states and groups. He has aimed to cut off billions of dollars to universities and states with Democratic governors and threatened funding for local public education and public health, leaving state leaders scrambling to find alternative sources of cash or cut spending in other areas. But,” the Times writes, “Democratic governors also have their own political ambitions to consider. Many in the party see their state leaders as the best hope to win back the White House in 2028. And the liberal base increasingly wants elected officials to aggressively fight Mr. Trump's actions.” But what is the “but” doing there? These governors are only torn between negotiating with Trump and appeasing their liberal base if working with Trump is productive and the liberal base is being irrational and focused on theatrics. But it's the cooperation with Trump that's useless theatrics. He's not giving them back the money. He's just making them crawl. The story describes how New Jersey's Phil Murphy is trying to use Trump to help him destroy New York's popular and effective congestion pricing plan. “He invited Mr. Trump, the story says, to an upcoming ribbon cutting for the new Portal North Bridge over the Hackensack River. And his wife,” the story says, “also invited Mr. Trump to come to an ultimate fighting championship event in June in Newark. Mr. Trump expressed interest, but the governor's outreach,” the Times writes, “has not spared him the Trump administration's ire. The top federal prosecutor in New Jersey, a Trump ally, said on Friday that she planned to investigate Mr. Murphy over immigration policy.” On the one hand, he'll humiliate you and possibly persecute you legally. But on the other hand, you won't get anything in return. Whatever is a governor to do. 

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.