Keeping Tabs on the Madhouse — Part Two

PARIS — It's not complicated. Suppose you've laid out a family Thanksgiving table and come in from aperitifs to find raccoons headed for the turkey. Either you run them off fast or find some open diner and then return to a raided poop-fouled pantry.

All creatures follow their instincts, humans included, and we can't appeal to the better nature of those who have none. Racoons are bad enough. Rampaging elephants that trample everything in their path are a whole lot worse.

The world already suffers immeasurably from Donald Trump's high crimes at home and belligerence abroad. Only weeks remain for Americans to grasp the enormity in detail and to get everyone they can to the polls on Nov. 3.

This second Report on finding reliable news sources focuses on the wider world. Most American media reduce coverage to briefs, then "breaking news" when it is too late to react. Bear with me, please. This one is long but never has so much been at stake.

Democrats, principled Republicans and uncommitted independents can empower Congress along with crucial statehouses to hold faithless Republicans to account. If Trump's rogue Republicans keep a majority, expect the unthinkable.

Whatever the results, Trump won't go away. He wages war in plain sight on democracy and decency, aided by billionaires, ideologues, trigger-happy lawmen and an old maxim: there is none so blind as he who will not see.

He flips off the courts, ignoring constitutional safeguards by framers who did not imagine mass-deception tools in the hands of a deranged malignant narcissist. Too many legislators feed off the public trough, ignoring the citizens they represent.

Documented reporting exposes blatant war profiteering and secret deals that return billions to Trump's family and inner circles. Money buys residence permits, Mar-a-Lago access and, for $100,000 a month, advance notice of stocks about to soar.

Desperate, Trump promises to spend a trillion-plus dollars paying $5,000 to every adult "if and when" Republicans win the midterms. At one rally, he called those who opposed his partisans "dumb son of a bitches."

On Saturday, he harangued a crowd at an Ohio high school stadium. If they turn out to vote, he said, "We’re going to win, and we’re going to win big, and we’re gonna shove it up their ass.” That is America's face to the world.

After covering failed democracies since the 1960s, I have not seen one, large or small, collapse from sheer indifference. If midterms go wrong, the world risks a fate beyond what T.S. Elliot evoked in "The Hollow Men": dying with both a bang and a whimper.

Trump's racism, self-obsession, greed, America-only focus and ignorant worldview were clear from the day he first tossed his silly red cap into the ring. But aides kept him in check. He called cryptocurrency a sham and did little to punish "fake news" media.

Eleven years later, nothing restrains his heartless flouting of Geneva Conventions. Anyone who condones his war crimes and fondness for totalitarian regimes is complicit. Ignorance is no excuse.

In the long term, his refusal to confront climate collapse pushes temperatures up a point where Earth will be too hot for humans. If AI gets out of control, there may be no long term.

Too many Americans take democracy for granted. Ukrainians have suffered for four and a half years to protect theirs. Trump triggered the war by hamstringing NATO and now does next to nothing to stop it.

Most news coverage is aimed at busy people with the attention span of fruit flies. It focuses on today's crises with little explanation of what — or who — caused them.

Over the weekend, I called trusted old sources and read until bleary-eyed. I found my marked-up copy of Luke Harding's "Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival," published while guns blazed in 2022.

Harding, a superb Guardian correspondent, covered the Kremlin from 2007 until he was expelled four years later. His earlier book, "Collusion," was subtitled, "Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win."

After dealing with Trump, Putin decided America would be no serious obstacle to restoring lost Russian glory, starting with an annexation of Ukraine.

"The crisis had been growing since autumn 2020 like a fog rolling in," Harding wrote. Trump was distracted by the Covid-19 pandemic he had let run wild. And he was capitulating to the Taliban to claim he ended the 20-year Afghanistan war.

Biden tried diplomacy at a summit in Geneva, but Putin had decided neither America nor NATO would stop his "special military operation." He would take Kyiv in days.

Putin chose Feb. 22, 2022 — 2/22/2022 — as an auspicious date to invade. But U.S. intelligence alerted Zelensky. Biden made satellite images public, spoiling the surprise. Ukrainians stopped Russian tanks at Bucha, a town of 37,000 people just short of Kyiv.

Reporters from everywhere followed the Ukraine army into Bucha months later. They found massacred civilians with hands bound behind their backs. Women and girls had been held for weeks of gang rape, then put to death. Homes had been blasted to rubble.

"The killings seemed to be demonstrative," Harding wrote. "It was a gruesome display, designed to intimidate those still living and to break their spirits." Europeans saw the threat at their doorsteps. A Russia bent on restoring past glory had to be stopped dead.

Americans reacted in horror. Biden called Putin a war criminal. NATO poured in military aid. Sweden and Finland expanded the alliance.

Campaigning in 2024, Trump pledged to end the war "on day one." But in August 2025, he fawned over Putin in Alaska like a smitten fanboy. Now, after killing or wounding half a million Ukrainians, Russia doubles down and tests NATO's resolve elsewhere.

As winter nears, Putin blasts power plants, transport hubs and cities with ballistic missiles against which Ukraine has no defense. Trump tells Volodymyr Zelensky not to target Russia's oil refineries. His idiotic Iran war has left the world short of diesel fuel.

Under Biden, Congress approved about $190 billion in grants. When Trump took office, he claimed that was $350 billion in loans. He demanded $500 billion in repayment. Or, he said, Ukraine could give Washington half its income from strategic minerals.

Zelensky came to the Oval Office to negotiate. J.D. Vance upbraided him as an ingrate. Trump yelled, calling him a dictator with no cards to play. Margorie Taylor Greene's fake-reporter boyfriend chimed in, saying he disrespected Trump by not wearing a suit.

"During the war, everybody has problems, even you," Zelensky said mildly. "But you have a nice ocean and don't feel [it] now, but you will feel it in the future." That statement of hard reality irked Trump, and the Ukrainian leader was summarily sent home.

Today, Ukraine has plenty of cards. But Trump has made it a passive profit center as he prioritizes vengeance on foes at home, wages war on truthful news organizations, amassing billions and turns America's capital into a gold-plated Gomorrah.

During the 1980s, Jack Blum, among my best sources ever, was chief investigator for John Kerry's Senate Foreign Relations Committee when the CIA, Ronald Reagan's Contra "freedom fighters" and cocaine drug lords ran roughshod in Central America.

Blum was key to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' 2016 Panama Papers, which exposed top-level corruption across the world. He is an expert on money laundering, oligarchs, cartels, shell companies and, especially, Washington chicanery.

Years ago, I said to him that when reporters shine light on a roomful of bad guys, they scuttle to baseboards like cockroaches. Yeah, he replied, but now they just look around to see what they can learn from others. Today, not much of that light is shined.

Corruption sleuths' first rule is to follow the money. Cryptocurrency lets companies, criminal gangs and terrorists move vast sums undetected. That, Blum says, pales in comparison to AI, yet public debate over its dangers overlooks its greatest threat.

He calls AI the ultimate totalitarian weapon. It can gather up minute details about everyone to tell governments who dissents or causes trouble. Its ability to punish is unbelievable. The Chinese are racing to control it. So is Trump.

"Imagine if Hitler had been able to do everything he wanted to do," Blum said. "Would there be anyone left?"

He first got to know Iran during in the 1980s when the Reagan administration secretly trafficked arms to Tehran to fund its CIA-backed war with Nicaraguan Sandinista rebels. He has since kept up with Iranian insiders.

"We've played games with Iran for more than 40 years," he said. "We did all kinds of bullshit, which has gotten us further into it. They played us like a bunch of fools."

Iranians, eager to be rid of Jimmy Carter, kept 52 U.S. embassy hostages for more than a year. When Reagan won in 1980, all were released on Inauguration Day. Soon after, Reagan backed Saddam Hussein in Iraq's eight-year war with Iran.

Human waves shouting, "Allahu Akbar," charged against Iraqi artillery and airstrikes for eight years. The war ended in stalemate, leaving half a million dead.

"These are people with incredible sophistication who know their history and have been negotiating for a very long time," Blum said. "They must be laughing now."

Hardline leaders may be laughing but not many among 80 percent of Iran's 93 million people who oppose the regime. Huge crowds faced murderous gunfire to demonstrate after Trump assured them help was on the way. None came.

Trump's "Donroe Doctrine," is a twist on James Monroe's 1823 edict meant to protect Western Hemisphere countries from outside neocolonialist incursions. Instead, he is trying to take them over to create hard-right kleptocracies.

His Venezuela "rescue" was a grand-scale gas station heist. He boasts of billions in oil revenue, but he spent measly millions to help victims of back-to-back earthquakes. His Cuba blockade evokes ancient days when armies starved city-states into submission.

U.S trade with Canada, a symbiotic old friend across a 5,525-mile border, approached a trillion dollars in 2024. Trump calls it "one of the worst countries in the entire world."

Argentina is squarely in his camp. And Brazil may follow.

After the first round of elections, Jair Bolsonaro's son, Flavio, has a strong lead over President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who says Trump is attempting to be emperor of the world.

Because few U.S. newspapers or networks do more than skim over "foreign" news, Trump gets away with preposterous claims.

He resolved none of those eight wars he brags about. Instead, he started one in Iran that impacts just about everyone on the planet.

Egypt and Ethiopia, for instance, fight only diplomatically over Nile water. But conflict rages in Ethiopia as Tigrayans battle government troops. Trump ignores the world's worst humanitarian crisis in a vicious civil war across Sudan, between Egypt and Ethiopia.

Trump has already lost the Iran war, which threatens to spiral out of control. Pakistan and Turkey now help Saudi Arabia battle Yemeni Houthis, whose drones and missiles bedevil shipping through the Suez Canal.

And Iran sheds glaring light on the West's vulnerability. Just the threat of terror feeds fears that Republicans exploit. One man near Britain's Fairford airbase, used by Americans to bomb Iran, told BBC, "Being safe is not the same as feeling safe."

When three mysterious trucks parked near the base, police arrested five Britons, then released them under careful surveillance. Trump claimed Americans had been tracking them. Not likely. He said they were a grave threat. How could the Brits let them go?

British law limits how long suspects can be held without evidence. More, the men were clearly pawns. Police wanted to track down their handlers, and soon they arrested others.

U.S. networks blanketed the story from the first break with long-distance "experts" who could only guess about details. Britain's new prime minister, Andy Burnham, urged against speculation and overreaction.

Trump did the opposite. He moved 12 B1 bombers elsewhere in what he called an abundance of caution, which many saw as a humiliating setback.

If Iran was responsible as it probably was, it had plausible deniability. It brought fear to the placid English countryside. Terror can strike anywhere. It showed how Trump creates dangers and tells his gullible followers that only he can protect them.

At a Nebraska rally on Monday, Trump said temporary pain at home was "a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.” Then he displayed total insanity — or feigned it to whip up cultist frenzy.

"They can take out a city," he said. "Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego."

He is obsessed with deep-blue California and its governor Gavin "Newscum." But, far beyond all his previous reckless lunacy, that makes the big picture clear.

A responsible press can only provide facts so citizens can draw their own conclusions. Even Britain's Guardian offered mild clarification: "US defence officials have previously stated that Iran currently lacks the capability to launch a direct missile attack on the US mainland."

Iran was nowhere close to having an intercontinental missile even before Trump insisted he "totally obliterated" its enrichment capacity last year. Until he scrapped the 2015 accords, outside monitors enforced its pledge to renounce nuclear weapons.

Why would Iran spark massive retaliation by attacking America? But in America's have-in-your-way mediascape, truth is whatever anyone decides to believe.

For all his empty promises at home, Trump has cut health care for millions, sicced armed thugs with badges onto the streets, labeled dissenters as godless commies and forced his name — or tried to — onto a memorial to John F. Kennedy, a far better man.

The most frightening image I've seen in a very long time illustrates this piece. Xi Jinping and Trump sit with shit-eating grins among prime tech bros eager to remake America in their own image. All are in black ties and tuxes. Jeff Bezos has a hand on Xi's shoulder.

What could go wrong?

Two chapter-heading quotes in Luke Harding's book define the moment. The first is from George Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

The other is from Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish American scholar-diplomat who lived through the worst of World War II, then its aftermath:

"All the crushing might of an armed state is hurled against any man who refuses to accept the New Faith."

Stephen Miller, Trump's bald Rasputin, made things plain in January on CNN:

"We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

No, not really. If that sort of totalitarian dream of doom is not enough to make Americans stand up and act, what is?