EXTRA: What Now?

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.

After 65 years of covering the demise of democracies around the world, I am scared witless. Every election from now on is vital for a dis-United States to save itself. Without its wealth and wherewithal, so goes the world.

As an Arizona kid, I grew up with High Noon-type movies. A white-hat guy comes into the bar and stares down a menacing badass in black, who slinks out the swinging doors. The bar crowd rejoices, and a beaming Miss Kitty splashes whiskey into his glass.

In real life (IRL in new brevity-speak), the villain's pals would likely beat the crap out of the Hollywood hero with barrel staves, or worse, when he walks out.

Today, they wear stupid red caps instead of black hats. Still, nothing changes unless outraged citizens get off their barstools — or living room couches.

Mel Brooks' hilarious 1974 spoof, "Blazing Saddles," makes the point. Racist townsfolk are saved by a black sheriff sent by a land-grabber governor hoping they move away. When they don't, he recruits a ragtag wild bunch to invade. The sheriff outsmarts them.

Gene Wilder, as a locked-up alcoholic ex-gunslinger who the sheriff sets straight, explains frontier bigotry: "You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons."

Hopeful signs suggest fed-up Americans can turn the tide. But not easily. Trump lucked into a perfect moment for a crook with no conscience or integrity. As Maggie Haberman says in her riveting book, "Regime Change," his superpower is shamelessness.

Lincoln's perverted Grand Old Party scares the gullible with the word "communism" — to which it adds "socialism" — as it implants fascism. Go figure.

Webster's defines "social" as "marked by or passed in pleasant companionship with friends or associates." Old-timers had pie socials. Now we have social media. The related word, society, has no taint.

Yet in Orwellian-Trumpian doublespeak, the "democratic socialism" that Scandinavians and other see as humanized capitalism, reeks of Stalin and Mao. .

Trump and his backers — billionaires and ideologues — are making Earth uninhabitable with their fossil-fuel addiction, heedless consumption and blasé approach to deadly pathogens.

The climate collapse they deny is advancing faster than even pessimistic scientists predicted. In temperate Britain, the mercury can top 100 degrees (38 Celsius). Phoenix is near 115 degrees for weeks on end when it is not much cooler at night.

Stephen Miller, whatever his titles, has a fair claim to be history's most hateful presidential aide-de-camp. And, heavens forfend, there is Pete Hegseth.

America's self-styled minister of war, with only nine years in uniform (for three of those in the Minnesota National Guard watching over prisoners at Guantanamo) now fires battle-savvy generals and admirals. Mostly, women, blacks and "fatties."

Trump inherited Barack Obama's thriving economy. After his Covid folly, it was somewhere near the depths of the Great Depression. Joe Biden brought it back to what The Economist called the envy of the world. Trump claims Biden left it in shambles.

Upcoming Reports will delve into details, facts and figures. In sum, Trump bears the blame for a needless border crisis, lost jobs, a soaring national debt, Afghanistan, Mideast mayhem, a bellicose China, Vladimir Putin's staying power and much else.

But more, he is committing crimes against humanity. He has yet to shoot anyone on Fifth Avenue, but the death toll of his Covid denial, slashed foreign aid and other heedless willful acts is climbing fast into the millions.

His global jihad on alternative energy is devastating. Miners and drillers eat away vanishing wilderness. Seas rise and heat soars. Wildfires rage out of control. Food crops wither in a hungry world. Ocean plunder he enables causes fisheries to collapse.

In one way or another, his actions and inaction are cutting short the lives of eight billion people. No one can predict how long before crocodiles and cockroaches survive but Homo sapiens don't. Does it really matter?

Trump's war crimes make a mockery of the Geneva Conventions that America championed after World War II. Consider Iran. In 2015, it renounced nuclear weapons, gave up nearly all its enriched uranium and allowed in outsider inspectors.

That deal with America, Europe, China and Russia opened the pariah theocracy to the world. Iran got back some of its own funds blocked as sanctions. Moderate political forces had a louder voice, and its moribund economy began to grow again.

But in 2017, Trump raged against any international agreement — even the Paris climate accords — sullied by Obama's fingerprints.

Biden tried to revive the accord, but he pushed for more and talks stalled. Trump could have restored the original terms. Instead, he was the first president willing to help Benjamin Netanyahu attempt to bomb his menacing nemesis into impotence.

Iran sheds harsh light on Trump's ignorant fecklessness, mercurial flipflopping and blatant lies.

In June last year, Operation Midnight Hammer dropped bunker-buster bombs on nuclear sites deep under mountains. Trump claimed their partial damage was "total obliteration" and demanded strict fealty to that phrase. He had neutered Iran.

In February this year, the story changed. Operation Epic Fury was essential because Iran was weeks away from nuking America. That was preposterous bullshit, yet cowed and corrupted Republicans sold it to his base.

Six weeks into what was to be a quick, easy attack, Trump was miffed. Iran disrespected his serial ultimatums. He took to "Truth Social," the misnamed private network he uses for fiats to the world and communication to 340 million Americans he is sworn to serve.

He gave one day's notice. If Iran failed to open the Strait of Hormuz by 8:30 p.m. Washington time, "a whole civilization will die tonight."

Ancient Persia today is a disparate nation of 92 million, 61 percent Persians but also a mix of Azeris, Kurds and others. They include brilliant men and women who excel in science, literature, medical and much else besides bomb-making.

It dates back five millennia in the Fertile Crescent, with world-wonder architecture and cultural treasures. In all countries. rulers and regimes change, and each is only temporary. Global heritage, evidence of our past, belongs to future generations.

Irreplaceable remnants are being bombed, bulldozed or left unprotected in Middle East unholy land, across Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Here in Europe, a mad malignant narcissist's efforts at genocidal ethnic cleansing left great cities in smoking rubble. Hitler came perilously close to destroying this City of Light.

Paris is not burning, but a tenth of the Fontainebleau forest to the south is reduced to ash and blackened trunks of noble trees. For 1,000 years, it has been hallowed ground for early royals and now families seeking an escape from urban life.

We can't bring back what is lost, and we can only try to calm down a pissed-off Mother Nature and appease our Supreme Leader, whomever or whatever he, she, they or that might be.

During a long life, my only profession has come down to a single word: reporter. But as the world has turned, the old "just the facts, ma'am" no longer cuts it. At 83, it's time to say things straight and damn any consequences.

Mostly, I've been a free-range foreign correspondent. But I grew up near the Mexican border and started out at a superlative Tucson morning paper, which is now a pale shadow of its former self.

I spent weeks at a time exploring sacred Indian sites, hidden waters and wildlife trails, all being lost now because of a high barrier as hideous as the one Ronald Reagan told Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down.

No crossings, my ass. Border agents tell me hundreds a day sneak in just along Arizona's Nogales sector. Those are the desperate. The "bad hombres" tunnel under, fly over, jet ski to San Diego or use fake paper to come in the front door.

As for fentanyl, cartels process Chinese precursors in Mexico, but mostly American citizens smuggle it through ports of entry to supply a domestic market.

In saner days up north, we crossed the world's longest friendly border with a wave and smile. Prime Minister Mark Carney just declared economic war with the United States because of arbitrary tariffs and trade bans. Canada, he said, refuses to be a vassal state.

Carney is a world class economist with long experience, who thinks fast and speaks real English. Also, French. He said trading patterns and cooperation with multinationals have sent Canada rocketing ahead of the United States for growth and job creation.

His main point applies everywhere. When a U.S president signs his deals in pencil, he said, historic trust is broken.

Afterward, Carney patiently and politely answered reporters' questions in detail. He treated them as equals whose purpose was to inform citizens about how the government was spending their tax money and improving their lives.

Trump savages the press more brutally by the day. When an MS Now reporter asked why Davey Hearn, the Olympian canoeist, was handcuffed to face a potential 10-year prison term for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, he replied:

"You are fake news. Don't ever talk again."

The epithets are endless. My early favorite was Orange Julius. On Trump's 78th birthday, Jimmy Kimmel came up with Hair Mussolini, Groper Cleveland and 76 others. Jeff Tiedrich on Substack calls him Preznit Fuckwit. It is time to stop laughing.

I've railed about the man since 1984 when he evicted poor people from old family homes for a parking lot at his Trump Dump casino in Atlantic City. Dangerous beyond description, he has a jackal's instinct to bite where it hurts. He never forgets a slight.

Of course, the world's woes are not only about him. But for now, they are. Americans need to remember Samuel L. Jackson's battle cry when the threat was only George W. Bush, a basically decent doofus in the hands of ideologue neocons: "Wake the Fuck Up!"

This time we face a self-obsessed non-neo conman, a convict still at large. Wherever he ends up, it cannot be anywhere near those nuclear codes. If Americans are to stop a rapid fall into corrupt demagogy, it is now or never.