On Dethroning a Mad King
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."
Dysfunction that Trump exploits, built up over decades, needs time to be put right. But a thundering groundswell before 2026 elections can get that started. It may be the nation's last chance before Republicans manage to corrupt the voting process.
The man's deranged lunacy is worsening fast. Soulless ideologues hover in the wings, backed by billionaires eager to plunder a dying planet plagued with at least 50 armed conflicts. This at the expense of their own kids' future. And everyone else's.
Americans need to go beyond vagaries to zero in on what hard facts reveal. At the root is monstrous corruption. When Harry Truman said, "The buck stops here," he meant a president takes responsibility for everything that happens on his watch.
Now the buck stops in Trump's back pocket. He scams billions while letting big-money donors gouge consumers, strip away natural splendor and build huge water-gulping complexes in regions that are fast running dry.
Just yesterday, the new Environmental Protection Agency chief revealed plans to scrap a 2009 ruling that greenhouse gases endanger public health, the basis for emission controls. It would be the largest deregulatory action in America history.
The president's obnoxious swaggering forces trading partners to make deals with an authoritarian China, which is fast muscling aside America with new technology, military innovation and sophisticated but cheap consumer products.
Those tariffs amount to extortion that raises prices for Americans. He uses them to punish foreign countries that defy him. Brazil, for one, is prosecuting ex-president Jair Bolsonaro for excesses in office that fell far short of his own.
Trump should be spurned on character alone. The world heard his Access Hollywood boasts of pussy-grabbing and adultery in 2016. Recent civil court judgments for sexual abuse and defamation added to felony convictions for fraud.
Lawyers with firsthand knowledge now tell me in detail why he has ample reason to tremble if the Jeffrey Epstein files go public.
But his failings go far beyond all that. Consider his reckless disregard for human life and suffering, which horrifies so many people I interview in countries that once admired a different United States.
The first of what will be many millions are already dying because he slashed vital aid, shuns desperate refugees and wages war while his truth-averse handlers declare "peace through strength."
A study in The Lancet, the authoritative British medical journal, estimates Trump's aid cuts alone could kill 14 million people by 2030, a third of them children.
As Vladimir Putin flips him the finger to triple down on Ukraine, and Benjamin Netanyahu intensifies what are plainly war crimes in Gaza, Trump flew off on a five-day "working" holiday to inaugurate a golf course named for his mother.
The National, an influential Scottish daily, ran a full-page headline: "CONVICTED U.S. FELON TO ARRIVE IN SCOTLAND."
Trump demanded that European leaders come to him, like Chinese emperors who required foreign devils to kowtow to them. His traveling press corps included groveling amateurs who tossed puffballs and jockeyed to be seen on TV cameras.
He banned the Wall Street Journal for its Epstein reporting. The Associated Press remains non grata for not renaming the Gulf of Mexico. U.S. taxpayers paid millions for his travel, security force and an extensive retinue lodged in his own pricey resort.
Each of those squandered dollars equates to a meal for families in places where hunger pushes them to migrate and, as a result, hatred seethes among young men who terrorist groups recruit.
Trump cons his cultists and others who ignore real news by blaming his debacles on his predecessors. At first, that was laughable. Now it smacks of insanity.
Did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton commit treason for the hoax of Russian election meddling? Should Oprah and Beyoncé go to jail for donating to Democrats? Mostly, his target is Biden, "the worst president in history," and his "crime family."
The fourth estate, honest journalists targeted by a vindicative president, need protection by the people they protect. Transitory "breaking news" means little without backgrounding from seasoned pros who dig deep beneath the surface.
Take Tim Weiner, an ex-New York Times correspondent who now writes page-turner bestsellers on the CIA, FBI and American foreign policy.
Reporters are cutting tools, and a lot of us have sharp edges. Weiner does it differently. Affable, amusing and generous with colleagues, he cultivates sources who speak frankly and trust him with secrets they know he will keep.
I met him in Jalalabad just over the Khyber Pass soon after 9/11. He parachuted in and quickly charmed the local warlord, who spent an afternoon serving him tea as he filled notebooks about Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
"The Mission," his new book on the CIA in the 21st century, nails down Russian machinations and disinformation campaigns to influence U.S. elections. Putin spotted Trump early on a fanboy patsy eager to build his erections in Moscow.
Weiner's timeline begins before 2001 when infighting among U.S. intelligence services caught the nation off guard during that black September. He details how and why George W. Bush's war on terror went so wrong.
Obama sent more agents abroad to work closely with allies. But Trump toadied up to Russia while belittling NATO partners. Washington lost out on previously shared intelligence. Putin decided Ukraine would be pushover, and he began to lay plans.
Weiner explained the chain of events last week on CNN's Amanpour Hour.
In 2021, Biden recruited young CIA spies within Russia to infiltrate the Kremlin. Kamala Harris met with Volodymyr Zelensky in Munich three days before the invasion. He was dubious. She showed him intelligence reports and satellite footage.
Then Biden went public, blunting Putin's surprise blitz on the capital. Ukrainians routed Russian tanks. Biden then brought well-armed Finland and Sweden into NATO, extending the frontline against Russia by 832 miles.
Weiner said CIA Director John Ratcliffe now distorts intelligence to please Trump after driving off the most experienced senior officers, firing everyone hired in 2023 and 2024 and imposing ideological purity tests for promotions.
Summing up, he savaged Trump's elimination of diversity policies:
"Diversity is a spy service's superpower. It's how you don't get caught. It is not good tradecraft to send middle-aged white guys out to spy in China or the Sudan or countries where white people are decidedly minorities. You want people with the cultural background, with the language skills to blend into the population.
"Terrible decision, all done in the name of political fealty to Donald Trump. Fealty, blind loyalty to a president is not part of the job description of the CIA director."
Trump speaks with a forked tongue on Russia. He now admits Putin has been "tapping" him along, a weaselly way of saying he was played for a fool. Yet he insists that he alone can handle Putin.
He entrusted U.S. intelligence to Tulsi Gabbard, still under a cloud for past coziness to the Kremlin. She now leads an investigation -- what Trump would call a witch hunt -- into what she says are false claims that Russia meddled in the U.S. elections.
Putin is hammering Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure with unprecedented fury. Trump gave him 50 days during the summer killing season to get serious about a ceasefire. But peace talks in Istanbul last week ended in deadlock after 40 minutes.
Now Trump says he might impose sanctions sooner than that, but even those would have limited impact. With all his bluster and flipflopping, a term supposedly coined by Lenin comes to mind: useful idiot.
Trump has more leverage on Benjamin Netanyahu. When he boasted during the campaign he could end the Gaza war on "day one," I suspect he probably could have. He just didn't want to for his own personal reasons. It's complicated.
Israel's symbiotic relationship with the United States dates to its founding in 1948 as a Jewish homeland after World War II. It was a Western democracy in a hostile neighborhood, not an oversized Vatican City-type seat of a particular religion.
U.S. military and economic aid over the decades surpasses $300 billion. Israel now thrives on its own. But it still relies heavily on weaponry and intelligence for defense, let alone its onslaught on Gaza and airstrikes across the region.
An upcoming Mort Report will dig into unholy land conflict. But for now, one glaring aspect reflects the result of Americans' isolationist turn inward.
The Guadalupe flood killed 138 people, and attention focused for weeks on 27 campers and counselors swept away to their deaths from Camp Mystic. Anguished parents faced unimaginable grief awaiting news likely to be bad.
That many young Gazans have been killed each day since November 7, 2023 -- nearly 18,000 -- from airstrikes, artillery and gunfire. Children and adults die from famine after months of blockade. Yet much of America focuses more on Epstein.
Trump now calls out Netanyahu but in tepid terms. U.S. intelligence agencies know exactly what is happening. But just this week, a disconnected president golfing in Scotland told a reporter, "From what I see on television..."
Americans are essentially eyeless in Gaza. Israel bans foreign journalists from the enclave, allowing in only a few on brief forays shepherded by military minders. When reporters are not there to bear witness in grim detail, truth is a moving target.
Look anywhere on the map. Much of the planet is drying up and blowing away. The rest of it faces rising, polluted seas. "Weather events" are increasingly destructive. Yet the rich nation best able to rally others to act in concert is obsessed with itself.
That old French phrase, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, had a ring of truth in the 1840s when it first surfaced. But these days, the more things change, the worse they get. There is time left to find leaders up to the challenge. But not very much.
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