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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
TUCSON — We know about tacos here in Baja Arizona, and Donald Trump is no TACO. True, he always chickens out and has a high grease content. But I've never heard of a folded filled tortilla capable of destroying a planet by sheer hubris and insanity.
In America's name, he threatened to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, imperiling 92 million people of different ethnicities along with diplomats, foreign technicians, visitors and Iranian Americans who return regularly to see families.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he posted on "Truth Social," his own anti-social stream of lies through which he addresses the nation and the wider world. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” It didn't.
Trump declared a two-week cease fire, already tenuous. So far, his $2 billion a day war has achieved little beyond civilian misery and destroyed cultural treasures from an ancient world that belong to our progeny, if any survive his jihad against climate action.
But his threat alone is against Geneva Conventions drafted mostly in Washington after World War II. "Genocide" does not begin to cover what that would mean. Airstrikes have already killed thousands of civilians, including hundreds of school kids.
His indifferent approach to wanton slaughter, combined with everything else we have seen since 2017, defines the man who personifies a dis-United States.
This is brief(ish) Report with a plan for suggested action below. There is not a day to lose. This is no time for despair, confusion or apathy. Trump needs to go now. And, later, so does J.D. Vance, a chameleon manipulated by billionaires and ideologues.
TUCSON — The Tomahawk missile that pulverized a girls' school killed perhaps 170 kids and their teachers the day a megalomaniac president set Iranian targets ablaze and plunged a woebegone world into crisis because of heedless hubris.
Obvious facts were immediately clear, but Donald Trump doesn't do truth. He planned the onslaught far in advance and struck during productive peace talks. A weakened Iran posed no immediate threat. Still, stoked after Venezuela, he wanted a perfect war.
"Based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran," he said, adding, "they are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran."
Two weeks later, Pete Hegseth, his gung-ho toy soldier "secretary of war" says investigations continue into what generals watched happen in real time on secure monitors.
That one tragedy in what Trump now recasts as "an excursion" is among countless acts of self-focused folly that define him. From his Covid denial in 2020 to slashed foreign aid last year, he is responsible for needless deaths already into the millions.
We should be clear as elections approach. A dissembling government for sale to the highest bidders at home and abroad is no democracy. When faux "journalists" parrot its leader's palpable lies via propaganda "news media," it is a brothel with borders.
For nearly a decade, Americans have watched a malignant narcissist wreak havoc. At first, he was an unknown quantity with an uncommon gift for selling snake oil to the gullible. By now, there are no excuses. We are out of time.
A world threatened by climate collapse and unstoppable conflict needs law-bound, empathetic global leaders with integrity who want something better for their own families and everyone else's.
"Stupid" is an unkind and indefinable term. I'll go with Forrest Gump's mother: stupid is as stupid does. But "ignorant" defines us all. It only means lack of knowledge about any subject we have not taken time to understand.
Elections this year are about power, not politics. America needs a two-party system. But Trump's perverted brand of Republicans, cowed and cowardly, are committing crimes against humanity. Anyone who votes for them is complicit, inadvertently or otherwise.
TUCSON — ICE terrorizes parts of America. Ice paralyzes much of the rest. Polls turn against a corrupt, climate-denying autocrat who sees the White House as his Versailles Palace and runs roughshod across the globe jabbing big sticks into hornets' nests.
Reporters close in on Donald Trump's starring role in shielded Epstein files. They include FBI interview notes with a woman who maintains that when she was in her early teens, he forced her to have oral sex, then slugged her when she bit his penis.
And so now, flushed with hubris after a quick abduction in Venezuela, Trump attempts a wag-the-dog war with the country that fought Saddam Hussein's Iraq to a standstill in the 1980s after eight years of artillery fire and human waves shouting, "Allahu Akbar."
At least a half million combatants and civilians died, likely many more.
This report will be brief. No one can predict the future. But after covering conflicts of every sort since the 1960s, my scalp tingled when Trump said the attack would last several days, if not weeks.
My guess is years, if not decades, if you factor in the fallout. Iran's supreme leader, at 87, is more interested in martyrdom than capitulation to the Great Satan. Proxy guerrilla groups on Israel's borders are weakened but still active. Remember the Houthis.
Iran's navy and shore batteries immediately blocked the Straits of Hormuz, throttling global oil supplies. They can bedevil shipping across the Middle East. Israel likely faces extended retaliation. Iranian operatives can bring terror attacks to the heart of America.
Trump declared: "You must lay down your weapons. Or, in the alternative, face certain death."
Perhaps he is the genius "peace through strength" statesman he claims to be. In this case, I hope he is right. But I think he is insane.
ORO VALLEY, Arizona — Donald Trump, a mix of Midas and Mussolini, is going for broke in America. If he and his despotic cohorts win their game of global Monopoly on a board with no "go to jail" cards, democracy and decency are over.
His latest lunacy is blocking Joe Biden's signature project, an $18 billion road-rail tunnel linking New York and New Jersey. He wants Washington's Dulles International Airport renamed Trump. That is not so laughable if you remember John Foster Dulles.
As secretary of state under Dwight Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles foresaw the inevitable result if NATO did not contain Stalin's Soviet Union. He fortified an alliance with Europe, restoring prosperity after Hitler tried to ethnically cleanse the human race.
Dulles was the main force behind SEATO, a NATO-like military and economic organization to confront Mao Zedong's "Red China" and thwart communism in Southeast Asia after a crippled Japan left Asia up for grabs.
He championed strong support for Israel within the 1947 U.N.-mandated borders — and action to resolve the "bitter fate" of Palestinians.
Trump is trashing all of that. He bullies allies and toadies to adversaries, risking hot war on an overheated planet. And most Americans, caught up in domestic drama, ignore the unthinkable looming dangers.
Oro Valley, just north of Tucson under majestic mountains, is a fool's gold reflection of a wider world fast nearing endgame. Republican zealots in a corrupted, cruel ex-Grand Old Party enable Trump to do his worst.
TUCSON — Now they are coming for the journalists, and we won't know what happens next. If these pigs who walk on two legs prevail, before long no one will be around to write "Animal World," a non-fiction sequel to George Orwell's farmyard allegory.
Even if our overheating planet does not slough off us hapless humans like dead skin, those tempted to "speak truth to power" will have a hell of time finding safe exile in an authoritarian world.
Last week while Donald Trump was making crystal clear that he is the worst U.S. president ever, a quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt went viral. The man who ended the Great Depression and led allies to beat back Nazi Germany declared:
"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."
As an old hand still able to jump out of a jeep and navigate hostile territory, I am shifting modes from Quixote to Zapata. Upcoming dispatches will shape big-picture mosaics of global challenges — and ways to confront them.
But this is drop-dead urgent. A senile, malignant narcissist president is siccing masked goons onto American streets to summarily execute good-hearted citizens, label them "domestic terrorists" and then flip a middle finger at anyone who objects.
TUCSON — Renee Good was the last straw. The snap of that figurative camel's back echoes loudly across every part of the globe.
Democracy is on its last legs when masked goons storm peaceful streets with apparent impunity to open fire on terrified, law-abiding young mothers trying to elude them after taking their kids to school — and then a president blames the victim.
Beyond so many Americans' narrow line of sight, decent people across the world watch Donald Trump with visceral contempt. Dictators, no longer constrained by values America once defended, pop champagne corks and make plans.
Today's headlines say Donald Trump threatens 25 percent tariffs on European allies who won't give him Greenland. Americans would pay more sales sales in exchange for risking a hot war with NATO, which has kept the peace since 1949.
He has mugged a southern neighbor for its oil, allowed Russia to run roughshod in Europe, tossed fuel on Middle East flames, and he continues to chest bump China toward a global war it might win. A "free world" cannot last long like that.
For a decade, he has exploited the gullible with guile, reshaping America in his own despicable image. The Grand Old Party no longer suits its nickname. Greed-driven faithless Republicans fall in line.
Trump thumps a bible he has likely never read. His text is "Mein Kampf." A Kool-Aid cult parrots outrageous Big Lies. An old proverb explains why so many others watch in silence: "There are none so blind as they who will not see."
Fearing a Republican rout in November, he is going for broke. His bogus "insurrections" presage martial law to thwart elections. Stephen Miller, his junkyard-dog deputy chief of staff, is blunt: We're in charge so shut up. Might makes right.
Polls say just over half of Americans believe Renee Good's death was unjustified. What in hell are the rest of them thinking?
TUCSON — And just as I was writing about hope for a better year...
Queen Elizabeth called 1992 an "annus horribilis" to describe royal family scandals and a fire at Windsor Castle. Small-bore stuff compared to 2025, when those words sounded like a Latin translation that sums up Donald Trump. A horrid anus.
The man's preposterous buffoonery at times deserves a good laugh, my draft began. Descending toward his level of discourse only plays into his grasping small hands, further inciting his cultists. We need to look up.
Then I woke up to big, bold type in the New York Times, what old-time editors call a war head: U.S. CAPTURES MADURO, TRUMP SAYS. Terrific. Back to the Colossus of the North days when the United States was roundly despised. But worse.
Trump made no bones about his purpose: "There is a lot of oil in Venezuela, and we need it for ourselves and the world," he said. Basically, it was a midnight gas station stickup writ large.
He said nothing about democracy or improving people's lives. He dismissed opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize he covets. as incapable and too unpopular to be president.
Venezuela declared independence from Spain in 1811 and fought its own revolutionary war. Now Trump says he will "run" the country, harking back to Hitler who remotely "ran" Poland, then most of Europe.
The country's 29 million people include diehard "Chavista" loyalists in city slums, eager for vengeance. Vicious cartels and criminal gangs based in mountainous jungle await to fight back.
When George W. Bush invaded Iraq, Colin Powell warned, "You break it, you own it." He was a battle-hardened general who revered the Constitution. Pete Hegseth is a toy-soldier loose cannon, whose motto is FAFO. Fuck around and find out.
Trump says big U.S. companies will exploit Venezuela's oilfields. That means American engineers and workaday "oilies" in remote places would be vulnerable to kidnap as hostages or terrorist attacks. What could go wrong?
TUCSON — I've stayed silent on what I know about that spine-chilling Associated Press photo of 9-year-old Kim Phuc running in pain and panic with two little brothers from napalm flaring behind them 53 years ago down a road in Vietnam.
It is time for some clarity.
That single image portrays why war is hell in a way no words can. Yet today as countless Kim Phucs suffer worse in much of the world, trust is fast diminishing in all "journalists," even those who risk their own lives to get their stories straight.
"The Stringer," a new documentary on Netflix, provides exhaustive forensics and emotional corroborating testimony to make a case that Nguyen Thanh Nghe, another Vietnamese photographer, took the picture for so long attributed to Nick Ut.
Accurate credit is important for history and the photographers involved. What matters far more is what AP labeled the photo: "The Terror of War."
Heated public comment, much of it by people who have not seen the film, illustrates the damage of today's open mic mediascape. When anyone with a keyboard or a microphone can chime in, truth is a moving target.
This is what I know — and what I don't. I have no case to make, one way or the other. June 8, 1972, was long ago. But one crucial moment is burned indelibly into my memory.
Horst Faas emerged from the AP photo section in Saigon to show bureau chief Richard Pyle and me, then alone in the newsroom, the negative he had selected from pictures that Ut and others had taken in Trang Bang.
We both said AP would not show frontal nudity. He shook his head, then messaged the photo chief in New York, who agreed the picture was too powerful to ignore. It went to newspapers around the world before I saw anyone else come into the bureau.
Controversy rages over which photographer was where on Route 1. For me, truth comes down to a single question. Did Faas purposely attribute someone else's picture to Nick Ut? For complex reasons, I believe he probably did.
Horst was a German photomeister for whom the word, legendary, falls short. I loved the guy, but not blindly. Only Nick knows who took that photo. The Pulitzer is still his. The World Press Photo award is in limbo. AP stands by Nick but admits some doubt.
Those who take journalism seriously need to consider hard facts with open minds.
PARIS — Before Thanksgiving cranberry sauce and football, American families might want to watch Ken Burns' stunning PBS series on the long brutal war to break free from a king. If time is short, its final words are enough: "The revolution is not over."
Donald Trump slithered back into office to do exactly what the founders most feared. He sees the people he is sworn to serve as subjects, not citizens. He wants obstreperous enemies of the people — even the Public Broadcasting Service — to be muzzled.
With all the charismatic grace of a rabid warthog boar, he jabbed an index finger at a seasoned Bloomberg reporter who asked why he did not simply release the Jeffrey Epstein files. "Quiet!" he snapped at her. "Quiet, piggy."
His handlers posted a clip of that scene aboard Air Force One. They meant to elicit sympathy for a great leader they say is badly treated by an "insubordinate" press corps that fails to parrot his preposterous assertions.
That began a monstrous 10 days of cruel excesses in the United States, at times maniacal, with reverberations across an imperiled planet.
In a democracy edging toward tyranny if not anarchy, American voters need hard facts set in broad context. Professionals up to the job face withering fire from a porcine president with a gift for exploiting cupidity and stupidity.
Trump is a useful-idiot warmup act for a cabal of sane but soulless autocrats preparing to undo America. He has already corrupted courts and the civil service, politicized the Pentagon and given free rein to ill-trained, overbearing law enforcement agencies.
Despite what he says, America is largely detested and feared abroad, no longer able to defend basic human values by example. China, Russia and smaller despotic states are reshaping the world in their own image. Climate collapse is at its tipping point.
Still, the national mood is changing fast as once apathetic voters see their own families feel the brunt of his folly. It is time to act now before it is too late.
All the president's menagerie needs to go. And next year, as America marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, voters can begin to shitcan them into history.
I am placing no bets. A nation of sheep is no match for circling wolves and cowardly jackals led by Orwellian pigs who walk on two legs. It all depends on whether enough deep-digging reporters at home and abroad can wake the flock up.
We have all seen enough.
PARIS — A headline in Le Monde over a chilling photo spread stopped me cold. It read: "We're buying time, but we won't win the fight; Senegal's Saint-Louis faces the inexorable rise of the sea." Oh lord, I thought, déjà vu all over again.
I am not much of a Hemingway fan, but his tale of old Santiago finally wrestling in a giant marlin and then struggling back to port with only a skeleton savaged by sharks turns out to be the perfect metaphor for what we hapless humans are now up against.
For me, it hits home hard. After 40 years of trying to report on what now threatens to be the most crucial global story ever, I've come up with bare bones. Overfishing and sea change are vastly complex issues. Yet few people care about what they can't see.
Reporting focuses mostly on shipboard slavery, brutality and crime. All are important, but they miss the main point. The ocean that sustains us all is rising and dying.
In 2014, The New York Times Magazine sent me to do a cover story from Senegal, already a stark vignette of the big picture. The editor liked my draft and asked for more. But a staff shakeup replaced him. Younger editors wanted more human drama and less fish.
By the time my story was spiked many months later, it was too outdated to take elsewhere. I kept at it in other ways, including a book proposal and an attempt to form a small cluster of specialized reporters. A generous foundation grant helped a lot.
Finally, I decided that old men and the sea are also an endangered species. I'm only a parttime piker with a small hook. Yet even David Attenborough's spectacular new film, "Ocean," his swan song at age 99, sank beneath the waves after its flurry of acclaim.
It includes some of the most sickening footage I've ever seen. Submerged cameras follow trawler nets on steel cables that scrape the ocean floor at high speed, ripping away breeding grounds, rich ancient coral beds and every sea creature in their path.
“It’s hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch fish,” Attenborough says. “Over three quarters of a trawler’s catch may be thrown away.” Large fleets heavily subsidized by governments are destroying Earth's most valuable common resource.
This is a saga of many parts, and I'll tell it as it unfolded, Papa Hemingway-style. But first, the backdrop.
BAYEUX, France — Each October this medieval gem of a town by those Normandy beaches takes stock of global realities that so many people refuse to see. The view has never been bleaker as a heedless world sleepwalks toward endgame.
Still, Bayeux is bulwark of sanity, a time capsule with a clear view of the present. Elders and kids alike fortify hope for a planet in urgent need of saving itself. I come up every year for recharge at the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy War Correspondent Prizes.
Time remains to snap awake and act. Yet nothing will change without trusted firsthand honest reporting about what is going wrong — and why.
Our jury of 40 includes reporters fresh from warfronts and forgotten places where people quietly suffer and die. We select words and images that fit human detail into broad context. Meantime, we learn from a thoughtful public how we can do better.
Correspondents mingle with more than 15,000 teenagers who ask probing questions before awarding their own prizes. Schoolkids mob photo exhibits and a huge tent for nightly insights and onscreen projections that reveal why war is hell.
Bayeux's cathedral houses the first newsreel, an embroidered tapestry that depicts the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066. That sparked a thousand years of territorial warfare, now splintered into countless brutal conflicts.
Allied troops from the opposite direction stopped a malignant narcissist from turning democracy into despotism. Hitler's aim was ethnically purified societies ruled by big money with a perverse hypocritical version of Christianity.
Now there is Donald Trump. No Führer, he is a pathetic, sick manchild who grabs whatever catches his eye with no regard for others. Still, he uses the same big-lie racialist tactics to inflame the gullible and greedy with blood-libel distortions.
For the first time in my 14 years on the jury, grim reflection dimmed the late-night partying. So many faux journalists get things wrong, inadvertently or on purpose, that real ones question whether it is still worth wading into the thick of things.
It is. Yet American news organizations are cutting back. Elsewhere, foreign correspondents are a dying breed, literally as well as figuratively.
PARIS — Almeria took four days to limp up the Seine to the boatyard last year. She just blasted back home in two. At 15 knots, less than school-zone speed limits, I kicked back with a pipe and a pile of books for a 100-mile voyage that spanned 2,000 years.
There were moments. A rib-bruising fall through a hatch slowed me down on the ropes. We again encountered the Auxerrois, a working barge that saved us on the trip up last year and nearly sank us on the way down. Lockkeepers declared a surprise strike.
Still, my old wooden boat is back at its mooring in the heart of Paris after a major refit, ready for another century afloat. In fact, as things look today, Almeria may outlive us all. I wish that was only literary license.
We dumbass humans are losing our wondrous world at breakneck speed, heedless of universal truths dating to Antiquity.
For an hour on the first morning two of us stood in the bow peering into fog so thick it blotted out the water beneath us, let alone obstacles ahead. As the current carried us along, I reflected on the rudderless big raft we all share with no one charting our course.
MIGENNES, France — A great joy in life has been keeping my noble old boat afloat. Her teak and oak planking evokes early civilizations venturing across a bounteous planet. But after a long refit, she is in troubled waters, either a Noah's Ark or the Titanic.
This is less of a Mort Report than just Mort, a cri de coeur from the deck of Almeria. I've learned much about people on rivers that Caesar's legions followed to build an empire that fell from hubris, greed and cruelty. The world changes. Human nature does not.
Crippled nations once had time to recover from imperial overreach or a madman's folly. No longer. All eight billion of us are in the same boat, headed in the wrong direction.
I call these dispatches "non-prophet." Reporters ought to focus on the present based on the past rather than speculate on the future. But what seasoned world-watchers see from hard facts is dead clear. We are rudderless, awash in perilous cross currents.
PARIS — Beyond the bullying and buffoonery, Donald Trump is fast reshaping the United States into his own cruel, greed-driven image. Americans have only months left to snap awake and pitchfork their delusional despot into history.
By now, anyone who enables his ambitions without the excuse of cognitive impairment is complicit. Hillary Clinton's impolitic "basket of deplorables" remark was premature. A decade later, it is a tepid understatement.
That "shining city on a hill" Ronald Reagan exalted is darkening fast. The Soviet empire had collapsed. China was in turmoil. India was a poor backwater. Today, they are united to muscle aside America's hegemony a year before its 250th anniversary.
I'm just 82, with only 70 years of watching nature turn hostile as dictators and zealots veer toward nuclear terrorism if not doomsday war. But nonagenarians with sharp memories ought to scare the crap out of anyone who takes the time to listen.
Consider my poet pal Willis Barnstone, now 97. We met during Argentina's dirty war in the 1970s. Plainclothes police grabbed people off the streets on mere suspicion of whatever and locked them away in secret, or worse, with no judicial niceties.
He was there to translate Jorge Borges, who later remarked: “Four of the best things in America are Walt Whitman’s Leaves, Herman Melville’s Whale, the sonnets of Willis Barnstone’s Secret Reader, and my daily Corn Flakes."
FLAYOSC, France — Nothing I've seen or heard during 70 years of reporting terrifies me more than watching an ignorant, deranged King Midas spew grotesque horseshit in the White House, unchallenged by free-world leaders or a pathetic "press corps."
The issue is now Ukraine, but the backdrop takes in every aspect of life on a planet that is sloughing off humans sooner than most Americans let themselves realize. Meantime, the world is shifting toward authoritarian rule, blind greed and apathy.
Donald Trump is clearly losing it, and worse awaits in the wings. J.D. Vance, the plutocrats' puppet. Stephen Miller's fascist militia. Kristi Noem and her foul-mouthed terminator, Tom Homan. A trickle-up economy. And a parliament of whores.
American democracy and a sane world order depend on informed, honest reporters to hold presidents' feet to the fire. Yet Trump's jihad on truth, aided by profit-obsessed news executives and partisan propagandists, makes that impossible.
A delusional narcissist president enables billionaires and ideologues to plunder an ill-informed working class they privately mock while demanding tribute from the wider world.
His "briefings" are fact-free ramblings and rants. Clueless hard-right zealots replace actual reporters. Bloated with self-importance, they make "journalist" a dirty word. Karoline Leavitt, on the public payroll, is a shameless shill for Kool-Aid cultists.
What America now faces is hard to grasp for people raised on basic human values. But we have already seen far more than enough. Tune out media babble, find experienced world watchers you respect. Then trust your own eyes to draw conclusions.
Start with the Alaska capitulation summit. And then the aftermath in Washington, likely the most shocking display ever to disgrace the White House. America's stately executive mansion is now a brothel, tastelessly plated in fool's gold.
DRAGUIGNAN, France — News from Israel echoes darkly here along the winding narrow rue de la Juiverie — Jewry Street — where rich medieval families built a stately synagogue, razed long ago, near what is now a fast-food joint called French Taco.
Jews in France thrived by providing financial services the New Testament scorned. They clustered in apartheid ghettos within cities, forced to wear yellow badges reading "Juif" and forbidden to venture out at night.
King Louis IX, France's devout Saint Louis, expelled Jews in 1236, partly to welch on loans so he could fund Crusades against Muslims in a land three major faiths called holy. Pogroms and persecution followed across Europe for the next eight centuries.
My father escaped Belarus as a kid. My mother's family fled Ukraine. Happily, they settled in America and not here. When I was born, Jews were being sent in boxcars to German death camps.
Today, 15 million Jews are all over the map, physically and spiritually. But their shared watchword is a prayer beginning, "Sh'ma Yisrael." Hear, O Israel. It refers to an ancient concept, not a small country run by a heartless politician desperate to avoid prison.
As a reporter named Rosenblum based in France since 1977, traveling often throughout the Islamic world, I have seen sharp shifts in antisemitism since 2017. That is when an ignorant, transactional U.S. president began wreaking havoc across the Middle East.
This is an analysis by a mostly non-practicing American Jew, a lifelong reporter committed to the elusive goal of "objectivity."
AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — Donald Trump defined himself in Texas early this month on the banks of the Guadalupe. Fixing a young reporter with a half-lidded mafioso glare, he said in his signature low, mean voice, "You are a very evil person."
"I don't know who you are," he added, "but..."
She is his boss, one of 174 million Americans eligible to vote. They hired him on a four-year contract subject to cancellation, and potentially prison, if he betrayed their trust by putting his own selfish interests ahead of theirs.
Trump, appallingly ignorant but not stupid, personifies the evil he projects onto others. And he does what despots have always done: shoot the messenger. In his last term, few people objected. Now he is back with ludicrous lawsuits and access bans.
Colonials nearly bled dry to escape a monarch. Heeding history back to Aristotle and Caesar, they crafted a failsafe constitution to thwart despots. It survived a Civil War, a Great Depression and Hitler's attempt to ethnically cleanse the world.
Today, it is a parchment relic in the National Archives of a nation that defends its Second Amendment — gun rights — more than its First. And without a free press that can tell citizens what a president does in their name, demagogy trumps democracy.
That reporter had asked Trump what he would say to stricken families not warned in time. An answer would have shed light on $4 trillion tax cuts and exposed Kristi Noem, the homeland security czarina preening next to him, as a cruel incompetent.
Stepping back, that defining moment is a dab on a vast ugly canvas. Much of the United States, a democratic superpower equipped to confront global crises while defending basic human values, is now deaf, blind and dumb.
Trump responded that way repeatedly during Covid-19. Pressed to explain his self-serving denial of a mysterious pathogen, he hurled vicious insults at journalists. Americans died in droves, and a runaway pandemic mutated across the world.
Now flush with contributions from fossil fuel and mining industries, he sneers at questions about looming climate collapse or devastated wilderness.
Out here in the real world, America's adversaries rejoice. Its oldest allies see a mercurial narcissistic bully them with crippling tariffs as he provokes needless war. At one point, I heard a gutsy reporter ask him why. He replied, "Because I can."
LA CROIX-VALMER, France — On a brief beach sanity break, I happened upon a Mediterranean landing spot where U.S. forces and allies invaded Hitler's southern flank as Operation Overlord stormed Normandy up north.
On D-Day, pilots of the newly formed 101st Airborne rained down hellfire. As their commander had said, their "Screaming Eagle" emblem defined a division "that will crush enemies by falling upon them like a thunderbolt from the skies."
The bald eagle, America's icon for 250 years, was saved from extinction by the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Congress made it the national bird at the end of 2024. Joe Biden said it symbolized freedom, strength and courage.
Six months later, an ostrich seems more fitting in a divided America.
Fearful ostriches lower their heads as if burying them in sand, vulnerable to a swift kick in the butt by any passerby. Yet their muscular legs and sharp claws can eviscerate a lion when their offspring are at risk. You can see where I'm going here.
Americans have only months left to look up, not down, and fight back. Feckless politicians are letting billionaires, ideologues, religious zealots and amoral "tech bros" pluck them down to pinfeathers. After 2026, it will likely be too late.
A mad would-be king whose mob-style extortions, greed, insatiable ego, depraved indifference to human life and reckless warmongering are turning a blindered, unreliable America into a global pariah.
In the Mediterranean, Donald Trump looms from the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar to hinterlands that include the ancient Persian empire, a monstrous chimera beyond anything Homer's Odysseus imagined. His dark shadow extends from China to Chile.
We are running short of time to protect a salvageable planet for the generations to come. Sensible citizens need to energize the apathetic, helping them see how, and why, so much has changed since those allied forces landed in Europe.
No democracy can be better than the people elected to govern it. Only a thundering landslide at the polls can rescue America and restore its historic global role of defending human values.
We need soaring eagles, not head-in-the-sand ostriches.
DRAGUIGNAN, France —For months now, a power-besotted buffoon who apes traits of Machiavelli, Mussolini and King Midas has been recasting the United States into his own image. Today, from the outside looking in, harsh reality is clear.
American democracy is dying in broad daylight. Millions turn out to protest Donald Trump's depredations. Yet at least a third of voters cheer him on. And a shocking number of those eligible to cast ballots neither notice nor care.
Now he has splashed kerosene onto smoldering embers in the Middle East, spiking geopolitical temperatures across a world on the boil. He had no accord from Congress as the law requires. Republicans were briefed; Democrats were not.
Among Western allies, only Britain was forewarned. As Trump said airily, it was America's show. The nation best equipped to defend human values and lead an imperiled planet toward a sustainable future is doing the opposite.
Responsible Americans turn out by the millions to wake the flock up. Yet during 60 years of reporting, I have never seen such a high percentage of free people willing to trade democracy for demagogy because of apathy or ignorance.
Trump's sudden strike on Iran during peace negotiations typifies his foreign non-policy. He jams a sharp stick into a hornet's nest, then retreats behind his massive ego, ready to blame someone else for the inevitable calamities that follow.
Reactions range from allies' seething contempt to adversaries' cork-popping glee.
My Belgian friend, Yves, who long ago gave up an executive job with Parker pens to make goat cheese in placid Provence, summed up judgment I hear from thoughtful people across what is left of the "free world." One recurrent word is monster.
Yves, once married to a woman from Ohio, knows America well. Like so many others elsewhere, he used to blame its faults and foibles on specific administrations, but he loved its spirit and sensibilities. Now he shudders at the mention of it.
"That man has affected the life of every human on Earth," he told me, with a sad shake of his head. "How can you live in a country that tolerates him?"
The answer is easy for anyone whose family found refuge in a different America and grew up knowing what it is supposed to be. This is no time to abandon it to the greedy and the gullible. Next year's elections could be the last chance to save it.
WILD OLIVES, France —Donald Trump is leading America off a cliff, and Republicans follow in lockstep. Democrats dither in disarray. A re-United States needs a thundering groundswell that transcends partisan politics in 2026.
A two-party system works only if lawmakers respect the law and consider all their constituents' angst before deciding how to vote. Elections are now cage matches to the death.
As Democrats jostle among themselves to find coherence, the choice smacks of two TV series: Monty Python's Flying Circus or MobLand. But one party defends decency and the Constitution. The other, corrupted and cruel, is bent on authoritarian takeover.
In 2026, an R next to any name on any ballot — federal, state or local — should signal ruination. With voter suppression and electronic dirty dealings, 2028 elections may be rigged in advance, if there are any at all.
A cross-party movement can energize 90 million eligible voters who stayed home in 2024. About a quarter of them voted Democrat in 2020 yet overlooked how Joe Biden restored the economy after Covid and kept isolated conflicts from sparking global war.
Many young people unschooled in critical thinking and misled by online echo chambers ignore global threats to their future. Many old ones, set in their ways and fearful of essential change, are easy prey to xenophobic stupidities.
Trump's health is a mystery, but his delusional narcissism plainly deepens by the day. He may soon "age out." JD Vance lacks cult-leader charisma yet is soulless, amoral and smart. If voters cede power to his billionaire backers, he won't need it.
With a firm grip on Congress, hobbled courts and an outmoded Electoral College system, America could have a Dear Leader on a par with Kim Jung Un.
FLAYOSC, France — It was Jake Tapper himself who torpedoed Joe Biden's presidency. That CNN "debate" in June, a stopwatch-timed soundbite duel, allowed Donald Trump to smirk on a shared screen while preparing facile lies to counter substantive answers.
Biden, ragged from a long trip and hard diplomacy, was over-prepared for a serious exchange on complex issues. After he blanked, it did not matter if it was a momentary lapse or something worse. More than a lame duck, he was a dead one.
Now Tapper shamelessly flogs an anonymously sourced cowritten book that sucks up airtime and print space while a dictator-in-waiting, truly off the rails, bullies Congress into crippling democracy while pushing an imperiled world farther toward the edge.
CNN calls itself "the most trusted name in news." If Biden was already unfit for the job in 2022, it might have said so. In fact, he was all over the world map, including on an 11-hour train ride to Kyiv under Russian guns, to build alliances. Trump played golf.
Andy Borowitz was closer to truth with satire: "Biden Covered Up Health Woes with Four Years of Booming Economy."
"Original Sin," evoking that Adam and Eve apple bite, is a less overblown title if you make a metaphorical leap: a crabapple tree in human form is bearing poisonous fruit, turning an erstwhile Garden of Eden into uninhabitable wasteland.
Headlines focus on one big reveal. Biden might need a wheelchair.
Franklin Roosevelt spent four terms on wheels while bringing America out of a Great Depression caused by a Republican president's overuse of tariffs, then taking the lead with allies to keep Hitler and Hirohito from conquering the world.
The book says Biden needs eight hours of sleep, as most healthy people do. Instead, we have a manic would-be monarch who taps out brain farts on his phone at 3 a.m. which devastate struggling American families and imperil millions of lives across the world.
TOURTOUR, France — I felt the mother of all rants coming on as a real-estate huckster in a disrespectful blue suit snored through a papal funeral — just after telling Volodymyr Zelensky he must cede to Satan the territory Ukrainians have bled for years to defend.
But faithful readers know my views on Donald Trump. Before getting into fresh facts, I imagined his own reckoning with Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates, facing the Ten Commandments without lawyers and truth-twisters on the public payroll.
Peter: "Let's skip adultery. I haven't got all week. How about bearing false witness?" Trump: "No, never." Peter: "Hmm, the Washington Post racked up 30,573 lies in your first term. Our lifetime tally wore out a dozen angels before they gave up in disgust."
It went downhill fast with coveting, stealing and all those graven images of himself that Trump markets at outrageous prices to his fleeced flock — even a schlocky King Donald's Bible.
There were awkward moments about Christ's teachings, like moneychangers in the temple and camels more likely to pass through the eye of a needle than uncharitable billionaires getting into Heaven.
Then Peter got to the big one, Thou shalt not kill. Trump sputtered: "But I never shot anyone on Fifth Avenue. That was just a boast to underscore my godlike status among all those suckers who worship me. Wait, let me rephrase that."
And here it gets serious — and very real.
PARIS — Françoise Giroud's old warning resonates across Europe like an air-raid siren. As a reporter, a Resistance runner and a Gestapo prisoner, she learned the hard way what can happen when a power-mad deviant unleashes fanatic ideologues.
"This is how fascism begins," she wrote. "It never says its name. It creeps, it floats. When it reaches the tips of people's noses, they say: 'Is this it? You think? Don't exaggerate!' And then one day it smacks them in the mouth, and it is too late to get rid of it."
Giroud, co-founder of the weekly L'Express, was the first French cabinet minister for women's affairs. Her Jewish father ran an Ottoman Empire news agency before fleeing Turkey with his family in 1916 to find refuge in France.
She watched Americans overcome an aversion to foreign entanglements after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. The United States took the lead in beating back an evil axis, then spent heavily to pick up the pieces of a shattered world.
President Harry Truman rallied international support for Geneva conventions on human rights and a United Nations as bulwarks against future tyrannies.
Despots succeed with fear, not love, Machiavelli wrote in his demagogues' playbook. They cow dissenters into submission, then reward sycophants in calculated measure. And they mask their own failings by demonizing vulnerable minorities in their midst.
These days, Americans mostly fixate on the moment, ignoring history. Protecting democracy depends not on heeding a 15th-century Florentine but rather a cartoon possum. Walt Kelly's Pogo had it right: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
America's face to the world is now a treacherous, semi-literate felon who mocks the rule of law and spurns free trade. Dictators play on his narcissism. And even the closest, oldest U.S. allies, infuriated, intend to push back hard in every way they can.