TUCSON — Between the skating and skiing, cameras flashed on what really mattered at the Olympics: two thugs in silk ties and shit-eating grins in the owner’s box plotting a new world in which their flags — one with stars, another with stripes — muscle aside America’s Old Glory.

And because a simpleton megalomaniac in Washington spent four years fixated on Monopoly, playing checkers in what Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin know is an elaborate chess game, the United States faces existential danger beyond description.

I call this Mort Report non-prophet; correspondents can only speculate on the future based on the present in light of the past. I am scared witless about far more than Ukraine — less because of Russia or China than of treacherous politicians, greedheads and useful idiots at home.

Ukraine’s history is long and complex. Just start with the Orange Revolution that began in November 2004 while George W. Bush was wading deeper into needless quagmire in Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack that triggered his all-out war on terror.

Ukrainians, who had fought hard for freedom and democracy, spent two months and a day in freezing weather until they overturned what so many saw as a rigged election. Police held back, fearful of violent response. Casualties amounted to one man who suffered a heart attack.

Contrast that to America in 2016. A plainly evident narcissist demagogue won because so many Democrats sulked when their candidate lost the primaries, and so many others did not bother to vote. He would still be president, I am convinced, had it not been for the Covid-19 pandemic.

We all watched Donald Trump toady up to Putin, taking his side against America’s own intelligence services’ assessments. Congress approved urgent aid to Ukraine, but he held it up in an attempt to extort dirt on Joe Biden. High crimes don’t get higher than such blatant treasonous treachery.

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TUCSON — Tom Kulka was going to be 90 in July, and, for once, a big family blast in Akron would be all about him. All his life, he was the sweetly smiling uncle, brother or friend who stayed in the background, making sure everyone else was happy — and sated to the gills.

When Jeannette and I were married on a North Carolina beach in 1999, Tom and his two sisters spent most of the three-day party huddled in the kitchen of a rented house stuffing cabbages — their renowned beloved golumpkis. And, of course, pierogis.

The Kulka-Hermann clan offered a warm welcome when Jeannette first brought home to Ohio a Jewish guy from Paris. The men indulged dumb questions about the Cleveland Browns’ game blaring in the background. We bonded over Cuban cigars I’d smuggled in. Mostly, I hung out with Tom.

He wanted to talk about needless wars, famine, poverty and all the rest that few people in a rich country bothered to notice. By phone last month, the subject was Covid-19 that has raged on for so long, impacting everyone’s lives.

In his gentle voice, which no one recalls ever rising in anger, Tom wondered how so many Americans could have gotten so stupid and selfish. He had his shots and a booster, masked up and kept careful distances. But still. He felt sick last week. Within 48 hours, he was gone.

His grandniece, Emily Pataki, a nurse at Summa Hospital, stayed with him. “We had polkas playing into his room,” she said, recounting his last moments. “He even gave us a little shoulder-wiggle dance at ‘Roll Out the Barrel.’”

Tom’s priest hurried over for last rights. He didn’t want life support, not even the cumbersome oxygen mask, the final step before a ventilator. “I’m ready to go be with the Lord,” he said at the end. “Now give me that Pepsi. I’m sorry but I have to go.”

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FLORENCE, Arizona — Hours after the Trump circus moved on, crews cleaned up the mess, restoring the Canyon Moon Ranch’s back forty to desolate scrubland. The Jumbotron and sound stage are gone. All that remains of the day is a cluster of colorful Porta-Potties — and what’s in them.

The “Save America” rally on Jan. 15 drew about 15,000 people, half what Florence police expected. Only partisan media took much note. The Arizona Republic in Phoenix covered it in wry “same-old-song” terms. The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, only an hour south, passed.

Donald Trump shouted his tired stock phrases. He promised a comeback “the likes of which nobody has seen.” It might have been as laughable as Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 classic, “The Great Dictator,” except for the strong possibility that he is right.

Florence and its Pinal County environs offer chilling insight into the Trumplicans’ plot against America. It is not a war, nor is it civil. Only one side is armed and united in a battle plan. It exploits a complacent citizenry to rig the electoral system in swing states, and it is gaining ground fast.

Driving up from Tucson, I heard a radio interview about Arizona’s venomous bestiary: 57 sorts of scorpions, 14 snake species, among others. The tarantula hawk, a two-inch black wasp, stings with screaming, lingering pain that overrides all mental discipline. Now there is worse.

Red-necked House rats, for instance, chomp away at democracy. Courts dismissed their attempt to overturn 2020 elections. The Maricopa County Election Board ruled that 76 allegations were misleading or false. But they keep at it, banging away at their bullshit battle cry: Stop the Steal.

That is just prep work. Trump is sowing election distrust the way he eroded faith in a truthful press. Trumplicans want partisan electors in 2024. Only decency and tradition have kept the Electoral College from rejecting the people’s choice. These days, America is short on both.

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EDITOR’S NOTE – If you’re new to these dispatches, this one is different. As a lifelong reporter, I aim to analyze, not advocate. But this a cri de coeur to help readers persuade the persuadable before it’s too late. Feel free to share it widely. Please.

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TUCSON – During five years of daily word storms — stories that matter, hyped “breaking news” and thumb-sucking punditry — I’ve stayed fixated on what Steve Bannon told the New York Times in January 2017: “The media should keep its mouth shut.”

That’s not how democracies work. A year later, Donald Trump’s fat-slob Rasputin explained his chilling strategy to author Michael Lewis. “The Democrats don’t matter,” he said. “The real opposition is the media, and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

Today the stench is sickening. Without a massive turnout in primaries and general elections, I believe American democracy is over.

This is no hair-on-fire hyperbole. Thomas Homer-Dixon at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, who has studied violent conflict for 40 years, warns Canada to prepare for a rightwing dictatorship and civil upheaval on its southern border by 2030 or sooner.

“We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine,” he wrote in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

I have covered coups d’état since the 1960s. Violent overthrows quickly succeed or fail. Far more insidious are those that creep up on free people who don’t react until it is too late.

Trump weaponized rifts among societal sectors, families and friends that have been widening for years. But the Constitution is still intact. This is not a civil war but rather a creeping coup that may succeed because of ignorance and apathy.

Too many Americans with the attention span I of fruit flies overlook blatant treachery, if not treason, and dereliction of duty. High crimes and countless misdemeanors go unpunished. In a country corrupted at the top, everything on down is up for grabs.

Voters can filter out the tower of babble that obscures actual news, but even well-intentioned watchdogs often bark up the wrong trees. Too many focus on the present, ignoring the essential background.

A few examples illustrate the damage done by a megalomaniac who stamps his name on everything he can.

• Trump politicized the pandemic and let it run rampant. He thwarted global efforts to contain it. Americans died lonely, painful deaths before he left office. Biden is now blamed for the inevitable impact: soaring inflation, broken supply chains and new Covid-19 variants.

• Trump capitulated to the Taliban, leaving Biden no options. The Afghan president fled, sparking panic. U.S. forces flew 123,000 people to safety, a stunning feat. Biden, who has tried to end the war since 2008, is blamed for what Trump calls the worst debacle in history.

• Trump escaped impeachment for withholding arms to Ukraine to extort dirt on Biden, who now rushes weapons to Ukraine because Vladimir Putin has amassed troops on the border to see whether America is as rudderless as it seems from the outside.

• Trump survived a second impeachment after he fired up a murderous mob to sack the Capitol, intent on overturning his electoral loss. Republicans shrug that off even after a dozen domestic terrorists, with more to come, are charged in a well-planned insurrection.

And now a Trumplican Party, savaging the Republican principles of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower, is working fast to corrupt the electoral system at every level. Newspapers and (truthful) networks provide ample detail. But far too many people pay little attention.

A soundly defeated president, or someone possibly worse, may well win in 2024 to reign over America with kangaroo courts, a rubber-stamp Congress, state legislatures eager to edit the Bill of Rights, and schoolboards that tell teachers what young Trumplicans need to know.

In 2004, with much less at stake, British journalist Andrew Marr made the point in a book, “My Trade.” A lot of people he knew shunned newspapers and tuned out news to focus instead on their own busy lives and local affairs.

“This is not good enough,” he wrote. “We are either players in open, democratic societies, all playing a part in their ultimate direction, or we are deserters.”

It is now or never.

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PARIS — As Bogey told Bergman when they parted in Casablanca, we’ll always have Paris. Sort of. Hemingway’s “moveable feast” today is often Big Macs on the fly. And when choked by fuming gridlock and scooter swarms, the world’s favorite city is an immovable beast.

There is still much to love, with new surprises. The 18th-century Hôtel de la Marine at the Concorde, no longer the Navy Ministry behind forbidding doors, is stunning, an open-air café and museum. Replicated ships evoke France’s mission to civilize the world, like it or not.

But new colors replace the dappled pastels at dawn and dusk that once defined the fabled City of Light. Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s campaign to turn Paris green has created a maddening palette of red no-entry signs, flashing blue on police cars and gray polluted air.

Elected in 2014, Hidalgo laid out plans to “reinvent Paris” with an eye toward Amsterdam in a city with 10 times the population, twice as many visitors, and neither canal boats nor a circulatory system of hop-on trams. Instead, she added a tenth circle to Dante’s Inferno.

Paris traffic was always a balance between the minuet and bullfighting. Drivers looked out for motorcycles blasting between lanes. Bikes sped along at the edges. Pedestrians understood survival of the swiftest. Now it’s a free-for-all breakdance.

Hidalgo closed arteries along the Seine, narrowed others for bike lanes, slashed parking and routed one-way streets into labyrinths. Barriers section off traffic circles that eased the flow.

Cameras enforce a citywide 30-kilometer (18-mile) an hour speed limit, even after midnight. At peak hours, you can make better time on a walker.

Her plan is a ”ville de quart d’heure” — a 15-minute city — in which people walk or bike to shops, restaurants and services close to home. “We must forget about crossing Paris from east to west by car,” she told Le Parisien in 2020. But delivery vans, repair trucks, ambulances, the old and invalid, exurbanites whose only option is driving to work?

And now with all-out preparation for the 2024 Olympics, heavy machinery chews up the city’s heart, adding yet more chaos. “Breathe Paris in,” Victor Hugo once wrote. “It nourishes the soul.” As paralyzed traffic spews toxicity, it also savages the lungs.

Hidalgo is running for president in April, a Socialist among left-leaning contenders in a right-leaning France. Polls put her below 5 percent. But, at 62, she can try again in five years, and she is going all out to dazzle her city. The impact is monumental.

The weekly L’Express just ran a cover showing the mayor perched on an ornate chair under the headline, “Queen of Disaster.” Brutal Twitter posts at #saccageparis show homeless camps, garbage heaps, and savaged landmarks in a city already $8 billion in debt.