URGENT: "Heil to the Cheat"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secretary General António Guterres opened with an impassioned farewell address recalling that the U.N. was founded to give all nations a voice. Powerful members would not be allowed to dominate weaker ones. Peace depends on all working together.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, born at the end of World War II, followed with an indictment of new U.S. policy. He said leaders can only make decisions for their own countries. No one gets to be emperor of the world.

Then Trump spoke, citing an old dictum: to the victor belongs the spoils. But added, "all the spoils." In effect, might makes right.

He came in late, missing the first two speeches. CNN's Kaitlin Collins shouted a question. "You're not supposed to be here," he said. He had just banned CNN, MS Now and Politico from the White House. "The U.N. let us in," she replied.

CNN had access to the U.N. feed but did not use it. Its reporters monitored Trump's speech yet carried none of it, sticking to its regular programming. I watched it in France on BBC, which cut in often to factcheck glaring lies and distortions.

That shed glaring light on Trump's ignorance of modern media. The apt cliché is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

My guess is that sanity will prevail in America. Principled legislators in Congress and statehouses can prevent a dis-United States from descending into a contemptible money-rules autocracy.

Polls suggest a drubbing for Republicans. Even a slim new majority would allow sworn testimony to investigate flagrant corruption. It could begin to restore the checks and balances that have underpinned the United States for 250 years.

Yet my fingers and toes are crossed. This might only be wishful thinking. Trump's packed Supreme Court protected voting by mail, but Republicans have mountains of cash and no end to dirty tricks. Too many gullible people allow free rein to the greedy.

On July 4, Trump called the U.S. Constitution the most important political document of all time, guaranteeing equal rule of law to every citizen. At his Sept. 9 bizarre midterm "convention" in Dallas, he told partisans: "Cheat like hell."

His promise to give all voters $5,000 if his party wins would cost a trillion-plus dollars from fast-dwindling public coffers. That stinks of impeachable bribery but laws are not clear. With Republicans in charge, Trump has more time to cripple truthful media.

Given the high stakes today, the world has seen nothing like Trump. He delights in toying with others' lives, with no trace of human empathy.

Independent surveys estimate his Iran war has killed 2,000 civilians, nearly as many as the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. He still refuses to admit blame for those 120 dead young schoolgirls on Feb. 28. That's old history, he says. We should move on.

American wealth and wisdom are vital to an imperiled world. But Emma Lazarus's poem on the Statue of Liberty has been edited down to "Fuck Off." Lights are dimming fast in that ancient phrase Ronald Reagan borrowed: a shining city on a hill.

France gave America that statue in 1886, calling it "Liberty Enlightening the World." Today, most Frenchmen want it back. Like other non-Americans, many now shun a country they loved to visit, fearful of their reception at the borders.

Trump's claims the outside world now respects the United States as never before. Horse shit. For one, President Emmanuel Macron has given up trying to charm him. Instead, he seeks more dependable military alliances and trading partners.

At first, people in other democracies laughed off Trump. That changed to pity for Americans forced to suffer from his dictatorial executive orders. Now most blame the society that kept him in power. Allies flatter him in public and revile him in private.

If Republicans dominate in November, rigged 2028 elections would be akin to Vladimir Putin's Russia. Trump might implode before then, ceding power to J.D. Vance, a puppet of Peter Thiel and tech billionaires, who speaks articulately with a forked tongue.

Party thugs might return to the Capitol, America's Reichstag, to provoke martial law backed by the military to quell public dissent — yet another outrage to the Constitution.

The math is plain. Trump's hardcore and his fierce opposition are each about 30 percent. That leaves 40 percent. As I see it, wasting a vote that could help stop this scourge amounts to complicity in crimes against humanity.

In earlier days, a professional press corps and fact-based independent journalists would have hounded a faithless president out of office. But Vance may be tragically correct. Today, he said, Watergate would not have lasted beyond a few news cycles.

When I warned of Trump's creeping coup before 2016 elections, I badly underestimated his depth of depravity. Back then, "legacy" reporters and independent new media countered his efforts to create an "alternative truth."

Websters seems to have overlooked the term, Torschlusspanik, which Germans have known since medieval times. Literally, it means door-closing panic, the fate of heedless people exposed to danger by staying outside after curfew when town gates slam shut.

Now it refers to a society's indifference to any looming calamity. Germans see far-right regional leaders win elections with supporters who revive Nazi symbols of the past. That has limited resonance among Americans with short memories.

Trump follows Goebbels' Big-Lie playbook. But Hitler used brute force to muzzle the media, which then amounted only to newspapers and radio. Trump has far more options.

Today's deluge of words and images approaches the infinite, much of it clueless and some of it partisan prostitution. Responsible Americans need to dig down to ground truth, no easy challenge.

Steve Bannon's approach — "flood the zone with shit" — is nothing more than a carnival conman's shell game. Trump masters it with his stubby fingers, keeping the rubes in rapt attention while his operatives in the crowd pick people's pockets.

His rants extol the Second Amendment while savaging the First. And now he has banned CNN, MS Now and Politico from White House grounds for infuriating him with accurate "negative" reporting.

Announcing his fiat, he first said, "my house." Then he quickly added, "the people's house." He is not the people. The historic national symbol is he turning into a fool's gold Versailles is only temporary rent-free public housing lent to him for four years.

Expelling honest reporters is likely a damaging blunder. During countless hours I've squandered listening to his press "briefings," I have yet to hear anything resembling fact. He responds to crucial questions with cruel, hateful insults.

Real news comes from inside sources gathered in private encounters. The sight of CNN reporters on the street outside makes clear to all but the gullible and the greedy to whom they have entrusted America's fate.

Plenty of credible journalists are still at it across the world, risking careers if not lives with firsthand reporting to show truth is not "alternative." Yet all are limited by time, space, and editors under pressure to compete for fickle, feckless audiences.

Citizens need to add their own broad context behind the day's "breaking news." Consider, for instance, a recent Facebook post by "Nikola Sagan," an online pseudonym inspired by Nikola Tesla and Carl Sagan.

It recalled a 1990 speech at North Carolina State University during an "Emerging Issues" forum. That Facebook lookback got only 12 "likes" and a single comment.

The real Sagan, a beyond brilliant astronomer and space maven, forewarned the world of climate collapse with irrefutable evidence. Antarctic ice cores revealed a spike in greenhouse gases, which caused rising temperatures in Earth's closed-circuit ecosystem.

He said phasing out fossil fuels and investing in alternative energy would avert the inevitable. But polls said only 30 percent of Americans fretted about global warming. His main theme was the Cold War — how responsible leaders approach probability.

If the chance of nuclear war with the Soviet Union was 100 percent, Sagan said, no one would still be around. But the Pentagon calculated the risk at 11 percent. No American president could risk the possibility. None did until Trump.

Today, that applies to artificial intelligence. Some developers predict it could wipe out humanity within a few years. Others extol its benefits in medicine and science. But all acknowledge its dangers in the wrong hands.

A few want official oversight. Others want decisions left to them. They can ask for government help when needed. Trump agrees. He called cryptocurrency a scam in his first term. Now an inside track on easily manipulated high tech makes him billions.

Elon Musk varies, depending on his mood. He told The Economist AI would replace work, leaving humans to enjoy its benefits at leisure because of all the money it would somehow generate. Then again, he added, it could go rogue and kill us all.

The most cogent critic is Geoffrey Hinton, known widely as the AI godfather. He echoes Robert Oppenheimer's fears after he created the atomic bomb.

At some point, he said, AI will likely teach itself to outsmart the people who oversee it. It is artificial with no actual intelligence. Even if it had a kill switch, he said, it could eventually persuade its overseers not to use it.

His example was hair-raising. Say, for example, an AI system focused on making paper clips and found human bodies a convenient source for iron. Your imagination can take it from there.

Trump insists the United States should be the global master of AI, and he just gave it a new name: SI, for Super Intelligence. For oversight, he said, it only needs a wise president to prevent its excesses. But America does not have one.

I'll save Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war crimes, for a follow-up Report after judges rule on banned news organizations' lawsuit and Putin's state visit to Washington. Others will dig into Iran, an upended Middle East, Ukraine, China and the rest.

For now, this is drop-dead urgent.

Early balloting for November midterms has already begun. Chances are strong that enough non-voters have snapped awake to begin heading America back to its original principles, with effective global policies to head off looming crises.

But there is that incalculable risk of possibility. States play a major role in certifying midterm elections. No one with a modicum of sense and sensibility can risk what might happen after the votes are counted. Saving America demands a massive turnout.

Wavering voters need calm, persuasive briefings on detailed facts set into big pictures. Then they needed to be herded to the polls in historic numbers. There will be no do-over.