America's Looming Referendumb
WILD OLIVES, France — Sorting through notes after six months in America, I happened upon this typical Trump tweet: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!” The man is semi-literate and impervious to truth.
In at least 35 countries, including Canada and Mexico, anyone born within their borders is a citizen. The United States alone was "STUPID" enough to give a corrupt, delusional, racist megalomaniac a second term to devastate so much of our imperiled planet.
As expected, Europeans pepper me with questions about America's wannabe god-king who so many laughed off at first but now view with seething contempt.
The problem, I think, is less stupidity than cupidity. A wealthy few manage to convince workaday families that soaring bills and hardships are not the president's fault. Too many Americans simply ignore real-world crises their leaders make steadily worse.
And although Trump's poll numbers plummet, he still has an ace in the hole, which he exploits with shameless blood libel: baseless fear of the off-white Other.
Rich countries need border controls as desperate families flee climate collapse and conflict. But America, with its wide-open spaces, depends heavily on fresh skills and scutwork labor. Slammed doors only shorten the fuse on a global human timebomb.
Ineffable poverty and simmering hatreds grow exponentially as Trump's fossil-fuel backers poison Earth's atmosphere. The millions he lets die because of slashed foreign aid leave behind survivors who swell the ranks of terrorist groups and criminal gangs.
Balloting in November will reveal whether enough Americans are ready to protect their own progeny from unbearable heat, rising polluted seas and freak violent storms as well as unstoppable military conflict and increasing demagogy.
It will be the most crucial election ever, anywhere, in a wider world badly in need of American wherewithal to confront common challenges. In a dis-United States, it will amount to a national referendumb.
I left Tucson buoyed with hope. It seemed no sentient voter could miss Trump's debacle in Iran, groveling to Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, kowtowing to Xi Jinping, economic idiocies, deranged self-worship and free rein to plundering billionaires.
Democrats across the country were countering his perverted Republican party's blatant plans to suppress the vote and skew election tallies. Hungary had shown that a tsunami of outrage can overcome all that.
But while I was aloft, packed courts upheld white supremacist gerrymandering. Gleeful Republicans began targeting darker-hued Senate and House candidates, spending multiple millions in hopes of retaining congressional control.
I landed in a Europe more divided than I had seen it during a half-century of reporting on solid post-war cooperation. In places, far-right splinter groups gain ground. Former friends condemn Trump's mercurial, smash-and-grab foreign non-policy.
King Charles, in America, gently but pointedly declared old allies must respect one another. Yet Trump's bullying of Prime Minister Keir Starmer tipped Britain's power balance toward Nigel Farage's right-wingers, endangering its two-party alternance.
Emmanuel Macron has stopped trying to mollify Trump, but his clout in the European Union is blunted by opposing factions in the French legislature. A housebroken heir to Jean-Marie Le Pen's old fascistic National Front could win the presidency next April.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz abraded Trump's thin skin by mentioning his "humiliation" in Iran. Soon after, 5,000 G.I.s were moved out of Germany. All NATO partners are miffed at insults for not joining a senseless war beyond their purview.
Even Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a MAGA enthusiast who rose to power by channeling Mussolini, broke with Trump over the Iran war and his lecturing of Pope Leo XIV on Christianity.
NATO's only call to action was to support U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 9/11. In 20 years, more Danes died there per capita than Americans. But Trump sees 31 partners as bit players, worthy of defense only if they cough up 5 percent of their GDP in dues.
The alliance's main function is to contain Russia, thwarting aggression that could cross the Atlantic. Circumstances vary. Spain, facing a low risk from Moscow, devotes much of its tight budget to integrate immigrants rather than repel them.
NATO members pay heavily for U.S. arms so Ukraine can blunt Russia's onslaught on civilians and infrastructure. On Victory Day to mark Hitler's surrender, Putin cancelled the usual parade of tanks and artillery, fearing Ukrainian drones over Red Square.
Trump gives the Ukraine war he pledged to end on "day one" lower priority than his mini-Versailles plans for the people's White House and a massive arch bigger than Napoleon's in Paris to celebrate triumphs he only imagines.
Despite the president's depredations and declining faculties, he still enthralls a third of eligible voters — blindered cultists and others anxious to amass wealth while they can in a lopsided economy. His jihad on news media makes it easy to hoodwink America.
In Europe, countless TV channels, daily papers and magazines depict today's world as it is. Americans can find many online in English. Otherwise, finding nuggets of expertise and firsthand reporting abroad among so much slag takes commitment.
Trump is tripling down to coopt some news media owners and muzzle others with threats that defy the First Amendment. His fake-news drumbeat discredits honest reporters. Slavish partisans replace many trustworthy seasoned reporters.
But we have seen enough already.
What matters now is to remember how America got this way. The picture is clear with a glance at a few people who remained at the Trump trough when he recast Lincoln's Grand Old Party into a private profit machine devoted to a mob-style don.
Some key players are too ludicrous to bother analyzing. Lindsey Graham, for one, is a shameless invertebrate who heaped scathing scorn on Trump until the winds shifted. Now he is a yapping warmonger who remains a safe distance from hostilities.
The bigger problem is a Washington press corps that seldom holds politicians to account. And worse, partisan opinionators who distort facts to reflect personal bias.
Jim Acosta, who excelled at CNN when it was still what Ted Turner meant it to be, just eviscerated Scott Jennings, a former Mitch McConnell strategist. He is the network's icon for "the Republican view" on absurd panels that replace actual news coverage.
Jennings' salary reportedly bumped up recently from $500,000 a year, along with $200,000 from several newspapers for his tendentious op-ed columns. That would pay for a lot of reporters' plane tickets.
He was once a Trump critic. But as a PR-agency shapeshifter, he now makes excuses for the president's every misstep. Sleekly smug in expensive suits with matching colorful ties and handkerchiefs, he demeans others in a hard-edged mocking voice.
When Adam Mockler, a smart young panelist, remarked that he supported war in any country starting with "Ira...," Jennings called him a kid with the attention span of a gnat. At one point, he snapped, "Get your fucking hand out of my face."
I watched the video. (See the attached link on Acosta's reaction). Mockler's hand was nowhere near Jenning's face, and the incident was just another reason why I leave the room whenever that face appears on CNN.
Even if Jennings was not a close-minded, obnoxious jerk, a "news" show that features a single member of a large national cohort is like a poll that samples only one person. And in this case, it is a Kentucky hack who counseled Sen. Mitch McConnell in 2009.
McConnell plotted to limit Barack Obama to one term, paralyzing crucial legislation he sponsored at the nation's expense. To me, that smacked of old Jim Crow, loading up the new president with 80 pounds of rocks and then saying, "See, the black guy can't run."
When Trump won, McConnell helped pack the Supreme Court. Trump was impeached for trying to extort Volodymyr Zelensky for dirt on Joe Biden by holding up missiles Ukraine needed to defend against Russia. McConnell's Senate refused to convict.
And then there was Jan 6, the most treacherous act in U.S. presidential history. Insurgents with nooses chanted, "Hang Mike Pence." McConnell condemned Trump in no uncertain terms. Yet again, he blocked impeachment.
This could go on ad infinitum, and I still have an unfinished piece from America about the challenges at home. But this supersedes all else.
American presidents are the face of the nation that elects them. Voters ought to remember that, whatever their personal feelings about Trump.
His casual threat to annihilate 91 million Iranians was a war crime. So was Pete Hegseth's order to fire on boat crews helplessly treading water in the Caribbean.
The Epstein files came up after the ill-fated White House Correspondents dinner. Despite Trump’s efforts to gut CBS, the Murrow-Cronkite network, Norah O'Donnell asked him blunt questions later on "60 Minutes."
She quoted from the gunman's prior manifesto: "I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” Trump flashed anger.
"I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people," he said. "Horrible people. Yeah, he did write that. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.”
O’Donnell had not mentioned Epstein. She cut in: “Oh, do you think he was referring to you?” And Trump snapped back:
“I’m not a pedophile...You read that crap from some sick person. I got associated with stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated. You should be ashamed of yourself for reading that, because I’m not any of those things. You shouldn’t be reading that on ‘60 Minutes.’ You’re a disgrace.”
In fact, Trump boasted about his "grab 'em by the pussy" proclivities in the Access Hollywood tape before he was first elected. This year, White House correspondents gave The Wall Street Journal its top award for revealing the Epstein birthday book.
Epstein file excerpts obtained by NPR, MS Now and others reveal repeated FBI interviews with a woman who said when she was about 13, Trump forced her down for oral sex and then hit her when she bit him.
In a country ruled by law, no one is "exonerated" if crucial evidence is kept secret. But despite ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi's earlier promise to release all six million Epstein documents, half of them remain under wraps.
Meantime, no part of the planet escaped impact from Trump's tariff fiasco and now his pointless war in Iran. Americans see soaring fuel prices. Diesel is already above $10 a gallon in France.
Temperatures soar. Paris is not burning but come summer forests in much of Europe likely will. Newscasts now begin with a hantavirus outbreak, not yet serious but scientists warn something worse will follow unless all countries work together.
Trump has the same response he had when he brushed aside climate change and then Covid-19 in his last term. Don't worry, we've got it under control.
Iran's assassinated supreme leader had banned weapons with a range beyond 2000 miles. In the 2015 accord Trump rejected, it gave up nearly all its enriched uranium and let in inspectors. U.S. and Israeli bombs in June set back its nuclear program by years.
Trump's claim that Iran poses an imminent missile threat to America is another blatant lie. Instead, his deranged war of choice vastly increases the danger of "soft target" terrorism and cyber sabotage by infuriated new leaders of the same old regime.
Democrats, hardly flawless, are divided over important issues that fall short of existential global threats. Still, they adhere to the Constitution and basic decency. If the looming referendumb goes wrong, American democracy may not survive its 250th year.
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