PARIS — “This time they have him,” Bob Woodward remarked after the Jan. 6 committee’s prime time indictment of an ex-president whose handpicked CIA director likened to a 6-year-old throwing a tantrum when his coup attempt went wrong. “They have him cold.”

But as he does so painfully often, Stephen Colbert caught the essence of America’s reaction to 1,000 witnesses and reams of irrefutable documentation: “Hanging over the hearings is one question that could define the future of our republic: Who cares?”

Above the Atlantic not long ago, I looked back at what is now the looniest country I have seen in a lifetime of reporting, and I recalled a line in “Lawrence of Arabia.” So long as tribes fight among themselves, Peter O’Toole says, “so long will they be a little people, a silly people.”

The complexities are clear at 30,000 feet. Donald Trump’s Republicans are what T. E. Lawrence described: “greedy, barbarous and cruel.” Yet Democrats squabble over grievances and social reforms that can’t fly because their left wing repelled enough voters to deadlock Congress.

In Loony Land, neither yesterday nor tomorrow matters much. Informed voters face an apparent majority — some silent; some obnoxiously boisterous — who make snap decisions based on dubious sources within their own echo chambers. Others just don’t care.

Analysts I respect remain upbeat. At crunch time, they say, Americans do the right thing. Joe Biden won with the largest popular vote margin since FDR in 1932. But despite spectacular reversals of Trump’s folly at home and abroad, polls say two-thirds of voters want him gone.

Crunch time is now. Even if Trump implodes in a whoosh of hot air, a fractured nation is left with others who court a base that shares his twisted values. Those 2016 rivals who called him an unfit race-baiting sexist who lies whenever he opens his mouth now grovel at his golf shoes.

Trump defends gun slaughter and medieval abortion laws that thwart women’s most basic rights while criminalizing doctors’ Hippocratic Oath. He embraces preposterous conspiracy theories and flouts asylum conventions America drafted for the world.

But it is far worse than that. House testimony amplifies what Maggie Haberman reported in the New York Times. During those hours when he did nothing to stop his Capitol assault as a mob chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” he told aides that might be a good idea: “Mike Pence deserves it.”

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GREEN VALLEY, Arizona — This golf-and-gardens mecca is Brown Valley when dust blows from mine-waste bluffs looming over it. With new open pits in the spectacular sky-island Santa Rita mountains nearby, paradise lost may be a harbinger of Hell.

Whether the pen is still mightier than the sword is a tossup. But bulldozers beat them both hands down. Once monster machines ravage nature, there is no going back. And in the American West, nearly out of water, squandered Eden is the least of it.

The bigger picture reflects all the linked facets of global climate collapse. It is starkly evident here in Green Valley, halfway down I-19 from Tucson to Mexico, and across southern Arizona. I’ve watched it happen, slowly then suddenly, since I was a kid.

Worsening endemic drought after so much past folly has left hydroelectric turbines on the Colorado River perilously close to shutting down, threatening power to millions. Suburban sprawl and thirsty crops in arid places deplete the last ancient aquifers.

Snowpacks no longer swell rivers in spring or recharge aquifers. Rigs dig deeper for fossil water under parched lakebeds. Unprecedented wildfires in dry forests, fought by aircraft that gulp up surface water, burn undergrowth that holds what rainfall there is.

A spiking demand for copper adds yet more straws that suck even harder from the same hammered sources. Authorities and politicians cut deals for temporary fixes to buy time. When taps run dry, it will be someone else’s problem.

Crises extend from Mexico through the seven-state Colorado River basin and up into California to the Pacific northwest. Despite a half century of increasingly dire warnings by scientists and journalists, “water wars” is no longer an abstract figure of speech.

In 2000, the Associated Press sent me around the world for a hard look. In Israel, the Sea of Galilee was so low Jesus could have walked across it by stepping on the rocks. Africans and South Asians abandoned ancestral villages when wells ran dry.

My own home ground hit me hardest. Until the 1900s, steamboats paddled 150 miles between the Gulf of California and Yuma, Arizona. A century later, I followed a pathetic trickle into Mexico, where it vanished into salt marshes long before reaching the gulf.

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TUCSON — It will take some time to see where France goes next. But that old saw — plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — is for sure out the window.

Emmanuel Macron beat Marine Le Pen soundly on Sunday, but the turnout of 72 percent was the lowest in decades, a shade below 2017 when he skunked her by a far wider margin.

Now France faces parliamentary elections in June. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left contender who tipped the balance toward Macron, wants to be prime minister. And an awful lot of workaday Frenchmen are hopping mad.

All National Assembly seats are up for grabs. If Le Pen’s National Rally party scores big in legislative voting, Fifth Republic loopholes would force “cohabitation,” and a coalition could conceivably make her prime minister.

But for now, I can almost hear the “oouf” of relief from eight time zones away.

Elated messages poured into the Elysée Palace from European Union leaders who feared Le Pen would hamstring NATO by pulling out of its unified command structure and thwart a united EU stand against Vladimir Putin’s genocidal assault on Ukraine.

Volodymyr Zelensky called Macron “a true friend of Ukraine.” Tweeting in French, he said “I am convinced that we will achieve new joint victories toward a strong and united Europe.”

Le Pen’s promise to ban Muslim women’s headscarves and crack down on les immigrés portended raucous mayhem in the streets. Her off-the-wall ideas, such as legislating by referendum, would likely have tied up the Constitutional Council indefinitely.

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TUCSON — My planned flight to Paris in two weeks could take longer than usual. If Marine Le Pen upsets Emmanuel Macron on April 24, it could land 60 years ago, back to when fear and fascism after the Algerian war nearly undid France’s bedrock liberté, égalité and fraternité.

The first-round results on Sunday made plain that the France I’ve known since 1968 is now something entirely different. Coming at a time when a modern-day megalomanic is committing war crimes that amount to targeted genocide, that is deeply troubling.

Le Pen is unlikely to win. But a map of the primary results showing the départements (states) she carried in the first round evokes a line William Faulkner wrote in 1950: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

She swept the Mediterranean south, heavily settled after 1962 by pieds noirs, families forced to flee Algeria after a vicious war of independence. Until then, Algeria was as French as Alaska is American. Diehard soldiers tried repeatedly to assassinate Charles de Gaulle in coup attempts.

And she took the entire industrial north, dominated by workaday families who suffer badly from rising prices and stagnant wages. Most see Macron as favoring big-money interests and tearing gaps in the social safety net that has protected them for generations.

Macron skunked Le Pen in 2017, 66 percent to 33. After François Hollande’s bungled policies crippled the Socialist Party, Macron appeared from nowhere, a 44-year-old silver-tongued investment banker with grand ideas. But this time could be a cliff hanger.

SAN FRANCISCO – American life, present and past, gets no more real than in the Mission District, where I occasionally escape into a hidey-hole off 24th Street to try making sense of it all. This time, I emerged half full of joyous inspiration. My other half is damn near suicidal.

It is my sister’s place, chock full of wise, witty old books, from Virginia Woolf to MFK Fisher’s “How to Cook a Wolf.” Henry James is on one shelf, James Thurber on another. Our grandma’s samovar from Ukraine sits under a colorful Twins Seven Seven painting I sent her from Nigeria.

Jane Kay, a celebrated environmental reporter, cooks sumptuous meals on an ancient enamel stove and laughs a lot with friends. She is the glass-half-full one in the family, seeking solutions while her brother catalogues glass-half-empty doom and gloom. But even she is troubled.

Two deranged men, vastly different yet eerily similar, have our world hanging on for dear life. It is no wonder Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin’s fanboy. Despots are despots, whatever the human toll of their self-obsessed depredations.

People in authoritarian countries mostly suffer in enforced silence. Americans only need vote for leaders who put the nation above themselves. But for a range of reasons, many don’t. And many others don’t bother to show up at the polls. The potential consequences are unthinkable.

Trump, increasingly buffoonish, may float off in hot air. But others preening in his shadow — bad shepherds eager to fleece a nation of sheep — could be worse. Jane and I watched Republican senators grill Ketanji Brown Jackson with blatant hypocrisy, an appeal to ignorant bigotry.

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