TUCSON – The old saw, monkey-see-monkey-do, is hard to avoid as Donald Trump plans to ape France’s Bastille Day parade. He misconstrues that Gallic clash of cymbals, showing a worried world what sort of chest-thumping primate now occupies the White House.

July 14, 1789, was when peasants with pitchforks -- the 99 percent -- stuck it to a greedy ruling class. The modern parade celebrates 1945 when allies helped France drive off a despot who thought not cheering at his speeches was treason.

“We have to try and do better,” Trump told aides, seeking a personal not-cheap thrill and totally missing the point. America hardly needs to flaunt armed forces that cost $642.9 billion in 2017, equal to the next 13 countries’ budgets, and will increase by $54 billion.

Spines tingle each year in Paris at the opening flourish: Three jets swoop low and close over the Champs-Elysées trailing blue, white and red smoke. Tanks chew up pavement, and missiles roll by. But hardware is not the point.

Crowds love gendarmes in red-plumed gleaming silver helmets on spirited horses in syncopated step: a Republican Guard that protects democrats. They cheer as Foreign Legion Pioneers, in beards and buffalo leather aprons, stride past armed only with polished axes.

Trump is no Hitler, but his laughably transparent Big Lie convinces a substantial hardcore. Few who profit from his exclusionary policies are fooled, just silent. He is not about Fatherland über alles, only his gargantuan ego. Think Mussolini. And imagine if Il Duce had had that big red button on his desk.

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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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