PARIS — It's not complicated. Suppose you've laid out a family Thanksgiving table and come in from aperitifs to find raccoons headed for the turkey. Either you run them off fast or find some open diner and then return to a raided poop-fouled pantry.

All creatures follow their instincts, humans included, and we can't appeal to the better nature of those who have none. Racoons are bad enough. Rampaging elephants that trample everything in their path are a whole lot worse.

The world already suffers immeasurably from Donald Trump's high crimes at home and belligerence abroad. Only weeks remain for Americans to grasp the enormity in detail and to get everyone they can to the polls on Nov. 3.

This second Report on finding reliable news sources focuses on the wider world. Most American media reduce coverage to briefs, then "breaking news" when it is too late to react. Bear with me, please. This one is long but never has so much been at stake.

Democrats, principled Republicans and uncommitted independents can empower Congress along with crucial statehouses to hold faithless Republicans to account. If Trump's rogue Republicans keep a majority, expect the unthinkable.

Whatever the results, Trump won't go away. He wages war in plain sight on democracy and decency, aided by billionaires, ideologues, trigger-happy lawmen and an old maxim: there is none so blind as he who will not see.

He flips off the courts, ignoring constitutional safeguards by framers who did not imagine mass-deception tools in the hands of a deranged malignant narcissist. Too many legislators feed off the public trough, ignoring the citizens they represent.

Documented reporting exposes blatant war profiteering and secret deals that return billions to Trump's family and inner circles. Money buys residence permits, Mar-a-Lago access and, for $100,000 a month, advance notice of stocks about to soar.

Desperate, Trump promises to spend a trillion-plus dollars paying $5,000 to every adult "if and when" Republicans win the midterms. At one rally, he called those who opposed his partisans "dumb son of a bitches."

On Saturday, he harangued a crowd at an Ohio high school stadium. If they turn out to vote, he said, "We’re going to win, and we’re going to win big, and we’re gonna shove it up their ass.” That is America's face to the world.

After covering failed democracies since the 1960s, I have not seen one, large or small, collapse from sheer indifference. If midterms go wrong, the world risks a fate beyond what T.S. Elliot evoked in "The Hollow Men": dying with both a bang and a whimper.

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ES ARCS, France — Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, a mad monarch with a parental problem, poked out his own eyes. Donald Trump, a power-obsessed wannabe, is trying to blind everyone else. And he is getting way too much help.

One despotic or despicable act follows another so rapidly that no one can possibly keep track. Far too many Americans simply tune out, which is his plan. But now he has made things dead clear.

A tax-funded "public service announcement" about to blanket airwaves shows him walking up a dark hallway. "This is the final battle," he says. “We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all."

By villains, he means Democrats, independents and all left-wing "communists" not in step with his own insanity. His over-armed zealots are ready to "fight like hell."

More than a dog whistle, that is a blaring siren no one with a heart, brain or family to protect can ignore. Yet on a CNN newscast last night, it was mentioned briefly after 35 minutes of small-bore stories and two four-minute commercial breaks.

Nothing is more urgent for Americans than sustained support for national reporters and foreign correspondents who are committed to hard facts. Without them, voters are not only blind but also deaf and dumb in a smoldering world.

Trump's drumbeat mantra of "FAKE NEWS!" undercuts faith in even trustworthy news organizations. Eligible voters turn to social media opinionators, clueless "influencers" and blatant propaganda. Reality is blurred beyond all recognition.

Democrats are likely to dominate the Nov. 3 midterms as Trump's Iran folly hits hard. But Republicans keep the White House, with billionaire donors bent on mangling truth and defying the courts.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat who had past high-level jobs at the CIA and the Defense Department, recently warned a Republican majority could rig the 2028 presidential elections or even create an excuse to suspend them.

Stopping him depends on the remnants of an American press corps that used to be the world's standard. News organizations are uniting to defend the First Amendment. But he is doubling down with help from faux journalists who echo his lunacies.

Averting what looms ahead — climate collapse, AI, authoritarian rule, widening conflicts, rising migrant tides, runaway pathogens — demands intrepid young reporters at home and abroad along with old ones to pass on vital skills learned the hard way.

A month remains before the Nov. 3 midterms, which may be the last free and fair elections in the United States. As always, the apathetic and ignorant won't bother to vote. Given what is at stake, no election in history has mattered more.

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PARIS —America's November midterm elections, the most crucial in human history, come down to a simple question: will enough voters step up to thwart a deranged self-obsessed president plotting a military coup de grace to solidify his creeping coup d'etat?

After six decades of covering democratic collapse around the world from apathy and ignorance, I am banging alarms as loudly as I can.

Only 73.6 percent of the electorate registered to vote for president in 2024, and 65.3 percent bothered to cast a ballot. In the 2022 midterms, turnout was 46 per cent. Look what emerged.

Donald Trump has defied Congress and the courts to demolish the White House East Wing, intent on a fool's gold Versailles topped with an airborne attack force, with an underground command center that smacks of Hitler's Führerbunker in Berlin.

My first draft of this was on folly abroad. Trump's senseless Iran war throws global order into turmoil. Slashed foreign aid is killing millions. A jihad on climate action to please fossil fuel executives who bankroll him is shortening the life span of billions.

But on Sunday America's commander-in-cheat said his 250-foot-high Arc de Trump will be a "desperately needed" fortress with drones, snipers and ammunition stores for national security purposes at the "strong request" of the U.S. military.

Since Independence, Washington has faced only two invasions: by Britain in 1812 and by Trump's own armed zealots in 2021. He pardoned convicted insurrectionists as patriots. Some now hold key positions in his administration.

Only Canada is close enough to launch a ground attack. Not likely. The sole purpose for such "defense" would be to quash citizen protests, which the Constitution allows, using the military within American borders, which the Posse Comitatus Act forbids.

On Tuesday, Trump told the U.N. General Assembly he faced a dilemma. He might continue negotiating with Iran on his terms, he said.

"Or," he added, "Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness?"

Iran's population is 93.4 million, not counting visiting foreigners and diplomats. Surveys estimate up to 88 per cent oppose the hardline regime. The war has already taken about 2,000 civilian lives, nearly as many Americans as terrorists killed on 9/11.

It no longer matters whether Trump is a demented lunatic or acting like one to divert attention from his grand plan. He is going for broke to be a cruel, racist monarch who rules the world along with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. He is no match for either one.

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PARIS — Back in America, that hapless adjective, incredible, sheds its beaten down cliché status to take back its original meaning: You can't freaking believe it. Spin the globe and point anywhere. Then just zero in on East Asia.

A Cloud-Cuckoo president embraces the wrong Korea, trashes crucial allies and chest-bumps China toward armed conflict. Yet he diverts America's lone aircraft carrier in Asian-Pacific waters toward a crippling war in Iran he spectacularly lost months ago.

It no longer matters whether Donald Trump is Hitler, Caligula or Bozo the Clown. He has exploited cupidity and stupidity to amass personal billions while reshaping America's 250-year-old democracy into his own despotic image.

And now he has lost his last marbles.

Robert Reich was probably America's best-ever labor secretary. Now 80, he is a gifted economist and an indefatigable educator. He just sounded an alarm that far too many Americans will ignore:

"Trump’s mind has gone. He is capable of doing almost anything, and evidently the people around him are unable to control him. (He) constitutes a clear and present danger to the United States. The 25th amendment must be invoked, or he needs to be impeached and convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors. Now."

Exactly. And both cabinet and Congress members who spurn their oaths of office must be held to account. The right to a fair vote is the only way a representative democracy can survive. Use it or lose it.

Late in 2004, Ukrainians stormed Kyiv streets and stayed three months in the bitter cold until they forced the declared winner of a corrupt election to back down. Look what they have suffered since February 2022, and they have no intention to back down.

Americans only need to stand up, inform themselves with observable hard facts from trusted sources and then herd persuadable people to the polls.

Nothing sways Trump's Kool-Aid cultists or rich people bent on increasing their fortunes while so many others suffer. They make up less than a third of the electorate. At least that many would walk barefoot over hot coals to thwart him.

Only a fraction of the remaining 40 percent would be enough to overwhelm Republican voter suppression, their gusher of money and their dirty tricks in an outmoded Electoral College. Then a new majority can begin depoliticizing the judiciary.

Congressional control by Democrats and Independents would prevent Republicans from declaring martial law before 2028 with some trumped up version of the Nazis' 1933 Reichstag fire.

Who should then run for president? I'd vote for Sarah Palin provided Tina Fey shows up to do the job. For, the focus is now on November midterms only weeks away.

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PARIS — Tommy Tuberville, a 71-year-old Alabama cracker elected to the U.S. Senate after too many hits to the head on football fields, recently told Fox "News" that Dr. Anthony Fauci "killed or was involved in the killings of nine million people."

An AI check helpfully called that "a claim the network said was unproven and lacked supporting evidence." Ya think? When people like that serve in Congress, a dis-United States is the polar opposite of a representative democracy.

For three hours, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky forced a man America should revere to invoke the Fifth Amendment 111 times lest some slip of the tongue — or any remark inquisitors could twist — enable faithless Republicans to burn him at the stake.

Every Republican on his committee echoed his bogus charges. Afterward, Paul skirted normal procedure to demand Fauci be prosecuted for contempt of Congress, possibly imprisoned. "One million died, and I think they deserve the truth," he said. 

The man is a pathetic little pissant. I've spent decades watching dipshits savage truth for self-glorification. Consider established fact and the wider implications of faithless lawmakers, then judge for yourself.

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