Our Annus Horribilis

TUCSON — And just as I was writing about hope for a better year...

Queen Elizabeth called 1992 an "annus horribilis" to describe royal family scandals and a fire at Windsor Castle. Small-bore stuff compared to 2025, when those words sounded like a Latin translation that sums up Donald Trump. A horrid anus.

The man's preposterous buffoonery at times deserves a good laugh, my draft began. Descending toward his level of discourse only plays into his grasping small hands, further inciting his cultists. We need to look up.

Then I woke up to big, bold type in the New York Times, what old-time editors call a war head: U.S. CAPTURES MADURO, TRUMP SAYS. Terrific. Back to the Colossus of the North days when the United States was roundly despised. But worse.

Trump made no bones about his purpose: "There is a lot of oil in Venezuela, and we need it for ourselves and the world," he said. Basically, it was a midnight gas station stickup writ large.

He said nothing about democracy or improving people's lives. He dismissed opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize he covets, as incapable and too unpopular to be president.

Venezuela declared independence from Spain in 1811 and fought its own revolutionary war. Now Trump says he will "run" the country, harking back to Hitler who remotely "ran" Poland, then most of Europe.

The country's 29 million people include diehard "Chavista" loyalists in city slums, eager for vengeance. Vicious cartels and criminal gangs based in mountainous jungle await to fight back.

When George W. Bush invaded Iraq, Colin Powell warned, "You break it, you own it." He was a battle-hardened general who revered the Constitution. Pete Hegseth is a toy-soldier loose cannon, whose motto is FAFO. Fuck around and find out.

Trump says big U.S. companies will exploit Venezuela's oilfields. That means American engineers and workaday "oilies" in remote places would be vulnerable to kidnap as hostages or terrorist attacks. What could go wrong?

The hypocrisy is stunning. Venezuela is a bit player in the massive flow of cocaine since Ronald Reagan's Contras — "freedom fighters" — began secretly shipping it to Florida's Homestead Air Force Base in CIA transport planes during the 1980s.

Trump captured Nicolas Maduro after pardoning a former Honduran president who bragged about supplying enough coke to the United States to keep half the country on a permanent buzz.

Early response suggests the abduction on trumped-up charges will boost a faux-president's plummeting ratings. It is a wet-dream triumph for Marco Rubio (remember, "Little Marco"?) whose Miami base still obsesses over Castro's seizure of Cuba in 1958.

No question, Maduro is one of those leaders Trump calls "bad hombres." But so is he. Voters entrusted him to protect a once-noble nation. Instead, he has switched off the lights in the world's exemplary "shining city on a hill."

As it happens, my first foray abroad was in the early 1960's when I took a break from University of Arizona journalism classes to work at the English-language Daily Journal in Caracas.

Venezuela thrived, flush with U.S. oil companies' royalties. A free-wheeling press exposed graft. Wealth trickled down to a middle class. Fair elections chose a successor to Romulo Betancourt, a Latin-American champion of democracy.

A Mort Report follows when the smoke clears. As we saw in Iraq and elsewhere, it is one thing to push Humpty Dumpty off a wall. But then who cleans up the mess? For now, I'll continue the piece I was about to post.

In an inspiring interview with Jonathan Capehart on MS Now, Michelle Obama hit all the right notes. Although the network was stripped of its NBC imprimatur, it ranks high among bedrock news sources that Trump works so hard to stifle.

Democracy is not broken, she said, but it is not being utilized. "You just quit, roll over and accept this for your children, your grandchildren?" she asked. "The fight is for them...and we should be ashamed of ourselves if we give up on them."

But without sustained national outrage, not much can change.

Ill-informed and apathetic Americans need help to understand why every vote in every election is so drop-dead crucial. Even a resounding landslide in November, as of now still unlikely, would be only a beginning.

Today's crises imperil eight billion people beyond America. As a foreign correspondent, I've watched ups and downs of eleven U.S. presidents. Trump is in a cloud-cuckoo-land all his own. Anyone, anywhere, who is not yet terrified ought to take closer look.

He is a demented Godzilla who sees himself as a god. He fans flames that he ignited in his first term. Conflict and climate collapse threaten human survival, yet he demands a Nobel for Orwell-speak policies his hypocrite handlers label "peace through strength."

His trashing of NATO convinced Vladimir Putin that Ukraine would be a pushover. His coddling of Benjamin Netanyahu at the expense of coexistence with Palestinians set the unholy land ablaze. For starters.

He has yet to shoot anyone on Fifth Avenue. Instead, his self-serving response to Covid-19, foreign aid cuts and border policies make him directly responsible for millions of needless deaths along with incalculable suffering and shattered lives.

Declining fast at 79, he may implode from too many Big Macs, Biden Derangement Syndrome or predawn binges of thumbed out brain farts. Two Trump-averse friends of opposite extremes had almost identical reactions, which concur with my own.

One, a Tucson artist who shuns the news, forced herself to hear Trump speak. She was shocked at how terrible he looked, detached and barely able to stand. The other, retired after life as a TV correspondent, lawyer, educator and novelist, captured the scene:

"He read it like a stoned eighth grader who didn’t quite learn all the letters of the alphabet. And when others took the lectern., he looked ready to fall over, eyes wide shut most of the time, swaying side to side. Truly, deeply weird."

If he fades away, J. D. Vance and his billionaire backers are ready to join foreign despots in reshaping our world into their own image.

The Constitution remains in force, and no one with the right to vote is powerless. A single imagined scenario should snap sleepwalking people awake to make America truly great again before it is too late.

Picture Trump and others who flout the Ten Commandments arriving at those pearly gates. Saint Peter, the scriptures say, uses the same lawyer-less screening that desperate refugees now get at U.S. borders and in raids by masked goons wearing America's flag.

Neither Pam Bondi nor Karoline Leavitt, a matched set of mother and daughter Bad-Barbie handmaids, would be able to help. One makes American justice a bad joke. The other tells laughable lies to sycophant reporters who cheer at Trump's bluster.

I'm no biblical scholar, but Matthew 7:12 in the New Testament says, "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you." That Golden Rule is also truffled throughout the Old Testament, the Quran and most other spiritual teachings.

If evangelicals are right, Trump and his cronies are bound for something far hotter than global warming. In any case, they sure as hell don't belong anywhere near public office.

A rebalanced Congress after 2026 can prevent Republicans from rigging 2028 elections, if not fabricating an excuse to suspend them. Still, another problem looms. News coverage of the wider world is fragmented and often contradictory or one-dimensional.

Polls show fewer than 2 percent of Americans see "foreign policy" as a key issue. Yet every existential crisis we face depends on a seasoned leader in the White House who is respected by allies and feared by adversaries. Skillful, quiet diplomacy is paramount.

That is grist for upcoming reports. Today, one egregious example makes the point: Trump's blood libel of Somalis who found refuge in Minnesota after decades of hunger, brutal warlord mayhem and grueling survival in bleak crowded camps.

Trump operates on absurd generalities. After a deranged Afghan attacked two National Guard sentries in Washington, he banned arrivals from much of the Muslim world. Biden's aides allowed him in for screening. But Trump's granted him asylum.

When a reporter asked Trump what Somali refugees had to do with Afghanistan, he replied, "Ah, nothing, but Somalians have caused a lot of trouble." He claimed Somalis "are ripping of us off" for billions of dollars a year while contributing nothing.

"Their country stinks," he said. "I don't want 'em in our country." Then he zeroed in on Minnesota's Somali-born Democratic congresswoman:

"Ilhan Omar is garbage. Her friends are garbage. They don't work, all they do is complain. Let 'em go back to their own country and fix it."

I've covered Somalia and the Horn of Africa often and at length since the 1960s. I remember an interview with an Ethiopian cabinet minister. Of course, we have terrible problems, he told me. If we could fix them ourselves, we wouldn't need outside help.

Until 1969, nine years after independence from Italy, Somalia had a functioning civilian government. Mogadishu, its laidback capital, was a colonial gem with memorable pasta and pizza. The only danger was from great white sharks that cruised the beach.

Then Siad Barre seized power in a bloody coup, provoking serial civil wars among warlords and tribal leaders. In 1992, fierce combat led to famine, U.N. peacekeepers failed to keep peace. George Bush père sent in the Marines and Navy Seals.

Veteran aid experts pleaded with Washington to fly food aid directly to the inland crossroads town of Baidoa, which is where Omar grew up. Generals insisted on first securing a base in the snake pit port at Mogadishu.

I tagged along on the Marines' first patrol into the city. Tough troops in combat gear made an impression. But within hours, kids rushed from the crowd to steal trenching tools and rations off their backpacks.

A draft-dodger U.S. president who boasts about his powerful military fails to grasp its limits. It is effective in combat and special ops. But not urban warfare. Unless it mows down civilians bystanders, it is as impotent as a musclebound weightlifter on steroids.

In the same way, aircraft can only support troops but not win battles. After Bush, Bill Clinton later tried that. For a details, read Mark Bowden's book, "Black Hawk Down." Somalis downed a helicopter and dragged its crew through the streets.

Ilhan Omar learned an apt African proverb at an early age: When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.

Innocents caught up in war are victims. Some turn to terrorism when their other choice is seeing their families starve. Omar's family made it to America. She became a citizen at 17. Admiring Minnesotans sent her to Washington in 2019.

She practices the sort of Islam that Muhammad defined in the Quran. "Jihad" can mean holy war but also persuasive proselytizing. Muslims, Christians and Jews are people of the same book with shared prophets. Ibrahim is Abraham.

With a name like Rosenblum, I've traveled in nearly every Islamic country, including Indonesia, the largest by far, which is Malay, not Arabic. I never felt any threat until apostate Islamists twisted spiritual beliefs into extremist politics.

Omar, not "anti-Israel," wants peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state. Me too.

The No Kings movement is crucial to building a popular groundswell, but the name misses the point. Britain's Charles is a king, a symbolic monarch in a long line dating back to the Magna Carta. We all just heard endless paeans to Good King Wenceslas.

Trump is something else entirely. For a laugh, he is an annus horribilis. But this is not funny. Especially because of the climate collapse he denies as he toadies up to fossil fuel and mining executives, I see him as the most dangerous man in human history.

America needs to reunite as a melting pot rather than a mezze of conflicting flavors. Jessie Lopez de la Cruz, a firebrand farmworker, stirred up the 1972 Democratic Convention. Her rallying cry, "Hope dies last," is the title of Alan Weisman's new book.

Today, hope depends on whether Democrats, Republicans and independents can put aside narrow interests for a common purpose. Donald Trump's monument needs to be a forgotten molehill in the Dakotas. Mount Flushmore.