DRAGUIGNAN, France — America is suddenly looking like itself again from across an ocean that over the past 16 months has widened into a forbidding moat. Different now, in a different world, but alive and kicking in a new coat of primary colors.

Earlier this summer my TV was at grave risk from flying objects. Each new day a plundering crime family, coldblooded profiteers and blind ideologues took another little piece of America's heart. A once-great nation was a loathed pariah.

But then World Cup fans from everywhere joined in the 250th birthday bash. They saw workaday Americans — as in, We, the People — take back celebrations from a mafia-don despot who tried to make it all about him.

Foreigners braved grilling at the borders and harsh security at the games. Yet crowds across the nation welcomed them like long-lost family. They ate barbeque with their hands, drank free beer, partied late and made lasting friendships.

Can-do ingenuity dazzled. Visitors were oddly smitten with ranch dressing, but TSA plucked bottles of it from their carry-on. Kraft swiftly came up with miniatures for them to take home where they spread the word about a big-hearted America.

They feted the Fourth under a blaze of pyrotechnics with joyous MAGA-averse music from Mill Valley to Valley Forge. The Boston Pops orchestra played backup to funk and jive near the harbor where colonials had dumped tea.

Trump struck a low note heard round the world. He strong-armed the games' organizers to reverse a penalty red card that would have kept America's star player from playing Belgium. Still, the Belgians won 4-1.

At the end, players did an awkward bump and grind to mock the little dance Trump does at rallies. In Brussels, team officials flipped a middle finger on social media: "Overturn this!"

Countless Americans who have shrugged off Trump's depredations, which by now amount to millions of needless deaths and incalculable human suffering, see their president for who he is. Whatever else, you don't fuck with football.

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PARIS — At 5 a.m., pastel hues reflect off the Seine. Stately stone buildings emerge against an Eiffel Tower backdrop. Just upriver, Notre Dame stands tall again, ready for 1,000 more years. All things considered, Paris is a jewel in a world worth protecting,

Yet today will be hotter than hell, even more than Baja Arizona, baking the paint on my floating home. Our port's mama ducks and their ducklings have moved elsewhere for breakfast. They take some explaining, so I'll start with the big picture.

Donald Trump belongs in a padded cell, if not behind bars. Certainly not the White House. The problem is as much who he is as what he does. Everyone with a half-open mind ought to know this. And yet.

The Mort Report began in 2016 when I recognized the same sort of coup-plotting malignant narcissists I've reported on since Mobutu in the Congo during the 1960s. Trump has excelled at it in ways I never imagined were possible in America.

He seems unfathomably ignorant, but we underestimate him at our peril. He masters any despot's basic skill: savaging truth while hammering away at easily debunked lies. Steve Bannon, America's Rasputin, puts it simply: he floods the zone with shit.

Most people react to each outrage only until the next ones. Nothing stirs up a critical mass — not even nearly a million needless Covid deaths, insurrection at the Capitol, blatant graft climbing fast into the billions or jury rulings of sexual abuse.

For the outside world, his senseless assault on Iran was the last straw. It broke that figurative camel's back with a sound that echoes to every part of the planet. Headlines focus on America's humiliation, but it is far more than that.

A nuclear attack on America would be murder-suicide for any country that tried it. Yet if the world's richest country remains addicted to fossil fuels, climate collapse is certain.

Because of a pathological obsession with Barack Obama, Trump trashed not only the 2015 agreement to curb Iran's nuclear designs but also the 2015 U.N. climate accords, which 195 countries signed here in Paris. That is why we are sweltering today.

As for those ducks, a grand plan to clean up the Seine for the Olympics altered its ecological balance. Much less natural organic matter in the water ruptured the food chain. A small part of a very big problem.

We need to understand the overall threat and what decent people with families and friends they cherish can do about it. Starting now. November is four months away.

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PARIS — Across Europe and beyond, old friends once smitten with America now view it with despairing contempt — an immigrant nation of warring "liberals" and "conservatives" that exceeds any théâtre de l'absurde playwright's imagination.

After a long look around in what was the United States, I found those catchall political labels so yesterday. Americans fall into two main categories: those who know about Shmoos and those who don't.

I'll get to them in a second. The top line here is that not nearly enough eligible voters realize the looming threat. If November elections go wrong, all the planned 250th anniversary hoopla will be for a country that no longer exists.

An unhinged madman backed by entrenched plutocrats could muzzle dissent, repress protesters with deadly force and paint "Fuck Off!" in big red letters on the Statue of Liberty that a once-admiring France gave to a different America.

Much of that is already happening fast.

Cartoonist Al Capp came up with Shmoos in 1948 — small, smiley blobs shaped like bowling pins that laid grade A eggs and gave milk. When anyone looked hungry, they happily expired to be fried like chicken or grilled like steak.

Their antics were so amusing that no one needed movies or other entertainment. But they bred quickly and consumed nothing, making them bad for business. Authorities hunted them into extinction.

Today, mutant Shmoos with human attributes vote uncritically for politicians in thrall of a malevolent Supreme Leader, who hammers away at whatever upbeat bald lies they want to hear. Others don't bother to vote at all.

Capp, a rapier-sharp political observer, explained why he came up with them:

"I was driving from New York City to my farm in New Hampshire. The top of my car was down, and on either side of me I could see the lush and lovely New England countryside... It was the good earth at its generous summertime best, offering gifts to all.

"And the thought that came to me was this: Here we have this great and good and generous thing—the Earth. It's eager to give us everything we need. All we have to do is just let it alone, just be happy with it."

I remembered Capp on Memorial Day, driving around from my Provence olive grove. The top of my old Peugeot was down. On either side I could see the lush and lovely French countryside. The good earth at its generous springtime best, offering gifts to all.

People are people. Borders are only lines on a map. We can still save what is left of a bounteous planet if we can just stop screwing it up.

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WILD OLIVES, France — Sorting through notes after six months in America, I happened upon this typical Trump tweet: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!” The man is semi-literate and impervious to truth.

In at least 35 countries, including Canada and Mexico, anyone born within their borders is a citizen. The United States alone was "STUPID" enough to give a corrupt, delusional, racist megalomaniac a second term to devastate so much of our imperiled planet.

As expected, Europeans pepper me with questions about America's wannabe god-king who so many laughed off at first but now view with seething contempt.

The problem, I think, is less stupidity than cupidity. A wealthy few manage to convince workaday families that soaring bills and hardships are not the president's fault. Too many Americans simply ignore real-world crises their leaders make steadily worse.

And although Trump's poll numbers plummet, he still has an ace in the hole, which he exploits with shameless blood libel: baseless fear of the off-white Other.

Rich countries need border controls as desperate families flee climate collapse and conflict. But America, with its wide-open spaces, depends heavily on fresh skills and scutwork labor. Slammed doors only shorten the fuse on a global human timebomb.

Ineffable poverty and simmering hatreds grow exponentially as Trump's fossil-fuel backers poison Earth's atmosphere. The millions he lets die because of slashed foreign aid leave behind survivors who swell the ranks of terrorist groups and criminal gangs.

Balloting in November will reveal whether enough Americans are ready to protect their own progeny from unbearable heat, rising polluted seas and freak violent storms as well as unstoppable military conflict and increasing demagogy.

It will be the most crucial election ever, anywhere, in a wider world badly in need of American wherewithal to confront common challenges. In a dis-United States, it will amount to a national referendumb.

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TUCSON — With his signature grace, Donald Trump deigned to reign over the upcoming White House Correspondents Association dinner for the first time since Barack Obama and stand-up comedian hosts roasted him like a plucked turkey.

"...Because the Press was extraordinarily bad to me, FAKE NEWS ALL, right from the beginning of my First Term, I boycotted the event, and never went as Honoree," he wrote in March on his personal truth-free, anti-social feed.

And the first part of his long post reflected a monarch so thin-skinned that he yells "Off with their heads!" at court jesters, like that mad queen down Alice's rabbit hole:

"The fact that these "Correspondents" now admit that I am truly one of the Greatest Presidents in the History of our Country, the G.O.A.T, according to many, it will be my Honor to accept their invitation, and work to make it the GREATEST, HOTTEST, and MOST SPECTACULAR DINNER OF ANY KIND, EVER!"

G.O.A.T, as you likely know, means Greatest of All Time. Hardly, considering Lincoln and Washington, or Franklin Roosevelt and other oath-keeping presidents at the annual event since 1926. But what a bullshit pulpit for a self-enamored fool who loves to gloat.

For Trump, it will be sweet revenge. In 2011, he sat stone-faced as Obama and a young Seth Meyers lobbed stinging one-liners at him to howls of laughter. That appears to be when he decided to toss a red cap into the ring.

On a big screen, Obama showed a mockup of what a Trump-themed White House would look like, uncannily evocative of what is planned today.

Rather than a traditional comedian to exchange jibes with a sitting president, the dinner's host is a mentalist, Oz Pearlman. Logical, Jimmy Kimmel quipped. Trump is a mental case.

The three-day extravaganza begins Friday with lavish sideshow events, the black-tie gala evening and afterparties, some hosted by faux-journalists, lobbyists, big business and foreign governments.

During Ronald Reagan's time, Mark Hertsgaard's classic book, "On Bended Knee," details how so many major news organizations were "subservient to state authority."

These days, the best reporters are better than ever, with new tools and technology. But the worst of them descend lower than their knees. The old Spanish term, chupamedias, describes them. Literally, sock-suckers.

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