Dumbass International Airport
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.
Garish homes, shopping malls and asphalt expanses despoil rich Sonoran desert. As everywhere in America, the fast-growing exurb includes principled people with solid values. But increasingly, human newcomers join its venomous native species.
It is a water-squandering, high-tech mecca built atop Indian ruins dating back two millennia. Oro Valley and the forgotten wisdom of Dulles are brushstrokes on a real-life canvas that depicts human folly more vividly than Picasso's Guernica.
Trump's recent despicable act was no dog whistle but rather a bugle blast. He fears voters will flush his creeping coup d'etat down a gold-plated toilet in November. And his racist, lawless, heavily armed hordes are plotting to prevent fair elections.
A fleeting video image depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as grinning apes. He faults an unnamed underling, as though he escapes blame if some fool addresses the nation in his name. In fact, that midnight post reeks of him.
Even if Trump's absurd claims of economic success and brilliant stewardship had an ounce of truth, he belongs in a cell, padded or otherwise.
In response to a storm of disgust over those Obama memes, Karoline Leavitt, Trump's Goldilocks Goebbels, told a lapdog press briefing: "Stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public."
In January 2021, insurgents stormed America's Reichstag with nooses to hang the vice president. They are back, pardoned as patriots. An attorney general and a secretary of Homeland Security terrorize the nation with Gestapo tactics. That ought to matter.
Trump targets news organizations that have set a global standard since the Dulles days. Some stand firm. But look at CBS, the Murrow-Cronkite network, now in the grip of tech moguls and their divisive, opinionated news director, Bari Weiss.
Tony Dokoupil, the Evening News anchor, was granted a 13-minute interview with Trump. Leavitt told CBS editors: “Make sure you guys don't cut the tape, make sure the interview is out in full...If it's not out in full, we'll sue your ass off."
No surprise. Trump sues networks and news organization for nothing more than displeasing him. He even demands $10 billion from Britain's BBC, although he has no standing to attack what is now, in my view, the world's most trusted broadcaster.
We all grow up in the reality we see around us. Americans who started school after Ronald Reagan took charge missed out on basic "civics." Young ones who see Trump as their first chief executive need an awful lot of catching up.
A U.S. president is a public servant, like street sweepers and dog catchers, but with no job security. Each, with a four-year once renewable contract, is sworn to protect all citizens' rights and to defend the nation "against all enemies foreign and domestic."
With enough else to do, presidents need competent communicators to keep their employers — we, those people — in the loop. It is only natural that they accentuate the positive. But, until now, reporters skewered them when they lied.
Last week, Leavitt spent much of a half-hour briefing to slime Biden and Obama, whose successes Trump claims as his own. Taking questions, she pointed first to a cheerleader who was plainly coached in advance.
He asked about an immigrant truck driver awaiting his scheduled hearing who he said caused an accident that killed four people. Leavitt held up a dossier she had ready as proof that new arrivals were dangerous criminals.
Skip the details; her credibility is zero. She castigates real journalists who ask serious questions, such as why masked thugs on the public payroll are free to execute citizens with impunity on peaceful streets.
In his own rambling monologues, Trump hurls insults when asked about the hundreds of thousands who died needlessly in America because of his self-serving Covid denial. Or the millions now dying because of slashed foreign aid.
Lately, he has affected a mafia don approach to briefings. With half-lidded eyes in a low voice, he deigns to give short, often demeaning, remarks. Handpicked "reporters" hang on every word. Whatever he says is seldom linked to what he does.
People are catching on fast. Trump calls Biden the worst U.S. president ever. An authoritative YouGov-Economist poll just out says Biden was better Trump, by 46 percent to 40. Another 7 percent said they were tied.
Grasping today's global complexities takes a great deal of reading and listening to experts on multiple subjects. But as an old pro once told me, you don't have to eat the whole pie to know what it's made of.
Just two forkfuls reveal the extremes of what has become of that good old American Pie Don McLean sang about in 1971. The first is an "immigration crisis," a solvable problem Trump himself caused and now exploits as an excuse for a despotic crackdown.
After George W. Bush blasted open Pandora's Box in the Middle East, refugees besieged borders in Europe and America. Asylum seekers and desperate migrants from across the world swelled a human tide.
Comparisons are tricky because circumstances change. Still, however the numbers are crunched, Barack Obama turned back or deported far more migrants in each of his eight years than Trump has managed to do in 2025.
Obama focused on undocumented crossers and lawbreakers who had sneaked in and stayed. Applicants faced careful vetting at border posts. Asylum seekers who could argue "credible fear" were processed. Others without papers were turned back.
Trump sought to discourage migrants with cruel family separations and vicious tactics. In 2019, aides blocked his plan to shoot border crossers in the legs to slow them down. After Covid struck, he sealed the southern frontier as a health risk under Title 42.
Biden faced a huge backlog, which grew as families fled conflict and climate collapse. On his first day in office, he proposed a law to address root causes, reform the visa system, grant residence permits (green cards) for farmworkers and many "dreamers," adults who came in with their parents as children.
It created an eight-year path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. That was essential. Studies show that the economy would stagnate without at least three million new people a year prepared to do scutwork or start new enterprises.
The law would hire more Border Patrol agents and magistrates, with temporary lodging for new arrivals to be quickly processed or sent back. After Republicans stonewalled it, Biden sharply reduced the crush with a program for prior online processing.
In 2024, Rep. James Lankford, a hardline Oklahoma Republican, drafted a compromise bill with Democrats to cut back asylum approvals, funnel crossers through ports of entry, speed up deportations and add better-equipped Border Patrol agents.
Trump ordered Senate Republicans to kill it. He wanted to run for reelection on a needless crisis of his own making. That caused nearly a year of more migrant deaths and suffering. Much of the world condemned the United States as a pariah.
Nothing shows Trump's duplicity and Americans' short memory than the climax of the 20-year Afghan war. He blames Biden, whose ratings nosedived and never recovered. It was the most humiliating defeat in history, Trump says, not adding that he caused it.
Big lies alter truth when Americans pay scant attention to facts. CNN, among others, got the last days wrong and has stuck to its skewed early conclusion since then. Most Americans accept the Biden's "debacle" as settled history.
Biden had campaigned on a promise to end the war, which he opposed since its outset. Polls showed that was what most voters wanted. As vice president, he urged Obama to withdraw, but generals insisted on a futile surge.
Trump had three years to exit in stages. In 2020, hoping for a dramatic pre-election feat, he capitulated to the Taliban and freed 5,000 hardened fighters, ignoring the Kabul government. When Biden took over, only 2,500 U.S. troops hunkered down in bases.
Afghanistan's dispirited army fell apart. The Taliban knifed toward the capital faster than Western intelligence agencies predicted. President Ashraf Ghani fled overnight. Panicked Afghans and foreigners stormed Kabul airport. The first days were mayhem.
But over the next 10 days, 125,000 people were flown to safety from a single runway, many of them Afghans granted refuge in America. U.S. officers negotiated help from the Taliban. Inevitably, shit happened. A terrorist bomb killed 10 U.S. servicemen.
Trump says he would have fought back, liberated the country and given sanctuary to Afghans who had worked with U.S. forces. He would have brought home billions of dollars in arms and hardware left behind. That is unhinged insanity.
In fact, Stephen Miller's heartless minions slow-walked visas for Afghans during 2020 when they had time to evacuate. And now, Miller is returning many of those who found asylum in America back to the Taliban who have marked them for death.
Now Trump bans all U.S. aid to Afghanistan. A New York Times spread with heart-sickening photos, attached below, shows the world how far America has fallen from the post-war ideals John Foster Dulles championed. Generosity to a troubled world is over.
After the war, Biden prioritized visas for imperiled Afghans and refugees from 10 other countries Trump calls shitholes. He set an annual quota of 125,000 for asylum seekers. Trump cut that to 7,500, mainly white South Africans he claims faced "genocide."
Enough for now. Each time I pause to check the latest news something worse happens. I just watched Democrats eviscerate Attorney General Pam Bondi for duplicity in a House Judiciary Committee hearing before a gallery of Jeffrey Epstein's victims.
Asked if she would apologize to the women, Bondi refused even to turn around and face them. Instead, she said they should file their grievances on the DOJ hotline.
Last year, she promised to release all files, protecting victims' names. Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump signed. But after months of delay, only three million files are public, heavily redacted to protect Epstein partiers and pals.
Bondi reacted with outrage when pressed about another three million files that Trump aides say will remain secret. With prepared dossiers, she veered off topic, insulting even Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who had voted for her nomination.
"Raskin," she snapped at the ranking Democrat, "you don’t tell me anything, you washed-up, loser lawyer. You’re not even a lawyer.” Rep. Jamie Raskin, with a magna cum laude degree rom Harvard Law School taught constitutional law in Washington.
Like Leavitt at that press briefing, Bondi brandished a photo of an immigrant who she said committed a violent crime, as if that excuses everything that ICE, the Border Patrol and whatever else the Trump regime is doing to undo America.
She was contemptuous, combative and dismissive. At times she went off the rails, once ranting that the Dow was at "50,000 dollars," meaning DJIA index reached 50,000, cold comfort for families struggling with high prices and health care costs.
Bondi called Trump the most transparent president in history. She claimed the Mueller Report showed no Russian meddling in U.S. elections. You could not make up this stuff.
As Rep. Dan Goldman of New York began his questions, she cut in: "Have you apologized to President Trump for that impeachment in 2016?" Corrected, she said 2017. I explained in my last dispatch how that triggered the Ukraine war.
This is the heart of problem. For many Americans, the real world is too far away. In opinion survey, "foreign affairs" barely reaches 2 percent.
Polls suggest a Democratic tsunami in November. That could reverse majorities in Congress and crucial states. But only if enough undecideds look beyond domestic inside baseball to outvote a lockstep Republican juggernaut bent on dirty tricks.
Voting is not enough. Energizing the apathetic will take patient persuasion to explain how much revulsion America faces abroad. A hard look at Trump reveals his innumerable failings.
He jets to the Gulf to collect largesse from oil potentates but skipped the Super Bowl, saying San Francisco was too long a flight. More likely, he feared what would be a chorus of boos loud enough to be heard down tarantula holes in Oro Valley.
He reviled an uplifting Bad Bunny halftime show. At the alternate Turning Point version, zealots heard Kid Rock, a white guy whose songs have extolled underaged sex. In one: "Some say that’s statutory, but I say it’s mandatory."
Trump asserts that the world respects America. The Milan-Cortona Olympics reflected a truer picture. He flashed anger at U.S. team members who mildly criticized discord in America, calling them unpatriotic losers who should have stayed home.
When the screens showed Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife at opening ceremonies, a chorus of boos rose from the giant stadium, muted on NBC but not on foreign broadcasters' relays. The use of ICE agents for security brought bitter objections.
Large crowds outside the stadium protested an America they no longer recognized. One sign summed up the mood: "We despise you."
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