TUCSON – Just to be clear, again, these Mort Reports are analysis, not opinion. This is not a blog but rather a series of dispatches from an old-crocodile correspondent who relies on what he sees watching the world at firsthand.

That said, after 50 years of covering self-enraptured authoritarians from Katanga to the Kremlin, I do not remember a more cynical twisting of reality and manipulation of emotions than Donald Trump’s first State of the Union.

Of course, some demagogues are stone-cold killers, and Trump is not. But none that I recall has been so hypocritical about his or her hypocrisy. Trump’s self-inflation, in my own experience, is in a class all its own.

In a big finish, he read off the teleprompter speechwriters’ words that should be true:

“As long as we have confidence in our values, faith in our citizens, and trust in our God, we will never fail. Our families will thrive. Our people will prosper, and our nation will forever be safe and strong, and proud, and mighty, and free.”

But the elected legislators who responded with that jingoistic chant, “USA, USA, USA,” have spent the past year helping Trump do the polar opposite: divide the nation, curtail freedoms, alienate us from others, and hasten climatic chaos that imperils humanity.

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TUCSON – Donald Trump’s epithet was not just racist and vulgar. Far worse, it revealed the depths of an ignorant man, devoid of character, whose ability to empathize with humanity goes no farther than what he sees in a mirror.

“Shithole” is part of any foreign correspondent’s lexicon. It refers to a place, not to the people trapped there who badly need help from a more fortunate outside world that is largely responsible for their fate.

America’s development aid, $31 billion, is the stingiest among major donors, per capita one-tenth of Sweden’s. Trump wants to slash that and build a pointless $70 billion wall that would heighten yet further global contempt for his America.

My first shithole was the Congo, where I spent two years in the 1960s. Baudouin Kayembe, my assistant, edited a local weekly with integrity and courage until Joseph-Desire Mobutu put him in prison, where he died at his captors’ hands.

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SCOTTSDALE, Arizona – This is just my own point of view, but I’m pretty clear about it after watching reaction to Michael Wolff’s neutron bomb, Fire and Fury: We Americans, collectively, have gone out of our flipping minds.

Wolff has spilled enough beans to bury Donald Trump, his clown-car inner circle and the self-serving legislators who enable him. At least, you would think.

But a 1980 Newsweek essay by Isaac Asimov is distressingly prescient at a time when human habitats are simultaneously drying up and flooding while an egomaniacal fool fingers a button that could blast a hole in our planet.

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been,” he wrote. “The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

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TUCSON – For reporters, things go according to plan, or it’s a story. I finally made it to Arizona from deepest Provence in time for leftover latkes at Christmas. But I now see why those eight tiny reindeer badly need travel insurance, a sense of humor and drugs.

Travelers’ tales are usually cheap shots. If we survive to tell them, we’ve escaped real tragedy. Listeners fidget, impatient to chime in with their own. This, despite all the first person, is not about me but rather what we have made of our world.

It started as one of those best-laid plans. I paid the usual Air France extortion money for Sky Priority, lowering the chance of standing in endless lines eyeing the clock as my gut deteriorates. Then, nothing to it: a one-stop hop from Paris to Tucson.

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LISBON – Techies snapping up real estate call this the new San Francisco. Moveable-feast jet setters see a new Istanbul. But this is still the old Lisbon, a fresh incarnation of the outward looking little capital that once ruled half the world.

It is as safe as cities get, clustered hills with gaily painted tiled houses and a Moorish casbah spilling down the cobblestones from a brooding stone castle, past the 12th-century Sé cathedral toward wide boulevards ablaze in colorful lights.

Down on the Tejo River estuary just off the Atlantic, people laugh and drink into the early morning, not bothering to hide joints if cops walk by. For some, things go better with coke. On Sunday, closely knit families gather for grandma’s cooking.

So Lisbon was the perfect place for an old pal’s 75th birthday bash in its elegant Old-World literary guild mansion.

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