TUCSON — I flew direct to Phoenix from Paris just before elections. Barely seconds after approaching a Global Entry face-recognition camera, an immigration guy 100 feet away yelled, "Mort?" I nodded. He waved me through.  

Cool, I thought. With such streamlined technology, new leaders could help steer America and the world beyond toward prosperous sanity. But voters chose authoritarians with different plans.

I flashed back to all the times some uniformed goon studied my passport, ran his thumb down a list, and said, "Step this way." Whether that was followed by sir, monsieur, señor or just a hard look, bad days would likely follow.

Gloating buffoons who think they "own the libs" need to read Orwell. Pigs who walk upright rule an Animal Farm by duping beasts of burden. They expel unwanted species and keep order with free-rein attack dogs rewarded for their zeal. 

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(This election post-mortem is my Sunday column in the Arizona Daily Star followed by an important update as the real Donald Trump gobsmacks a worried, wary world.)

TUCSON -- A basic fact underlies the aftermath finger-pointing and thumb-sucking. Democracies get the government they deserve. A treacherous felon seized unthinkable power in America because so many voters fell for his blatant, cruel savaging of truth.

Donald Trump intends to let billionaire backers plunder natural wealth and fleece workaday families like flocked sheep. Faux-Christian ideologues plan to surveil wombs and classrooms of constituents they swear to serve. "Rule of law" will be a laugh line.

Fires that Trump sparked off in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia already flare toward unstoppable conflicts. He favors despots and aggressors while undermining alliances that have prevented global war since the 1940s.

The "border crisis" he exploits with preposterous lies reflects a worldwide tragedy he worsened by denying climate collapse, refusing aid to desperate "shitholes," weakening international organizations and condoning tyrants who oppress their own people.

Trump, addled at 78, and a young vice president pledge to turn America's back to the world, depriving eight billion people of the largesse and leadership they badly need as Earth alternately dries up and washes away. Blowback at home would be devastating.

So far, the Constitution remains intact. If sentient citizens protect democracy at every turn, 2026 elections can take back Congress and state legislatures, then build a groundswell to rescue what is left of America in 2028. That is a very big if.

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PARIS — I'm flying back to Tucson this weekend for High Noon at the Last Chance Saloon. When the dust settles, I'm counting on a tequila sunrise, not a hemlock margarita. Can a plurality of Americans in a few key states be so greedy, cruel or easily duped?

Then, again...

Andy Borowitz is still fall-down funny, but in an upended America his biting satire is hard news. He captured the threat in a single question: Do we want a Hitler or not?

Trump's true colors have been clear since his blood libel against Muslims and Mexicans when he descended his fool's gold escalator nine years ago. Citing Nazi Germany seemed extreme then. In Madison Square Garden, he went full-blown Führer.

"Make no mistake," Tim Walz said later. "He knew exactly what he was doing." Lincoln Project ads and history books make plain it was a redux of a frightening pro-Nazi rally in 1939. Same place, similar howling haters. But with Old Glory flags, not swaztikas.

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BAYEUX, France — This gem of a medieval Normandy town, nearly flattened by allied bombers in 1944 to stop a power-obsessed madman from swallowing Britain and moving on, puts looming American elections into sharp, stark focus.

Today, Bayeux encapsulates a hoary adage now fraught with urgent meaning: There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Conflicts flare across an overheated, hungry planet that already sloughs off humans like dead skin. A patently deranged narcissist uses Hitler's playbook to con the clueless into giving him absolute control of a dis-United States at war with itself.

Donald Trump has no ambition to conquer the world. He wants to ignore it behind closed borders while using America's economic and military heft to exploit the other eight billion people who share an imperiled planet.

Whether he succeeds depends on how many eligible voters decide to opt out — to be deserters — or to support Trump, in effect, by wasting a ballot on a third-party candidate because of a thin grasp of the world as it is.

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PARIS — Polls say about 25 million eligible voters remain undecided as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump run neck and neck. A handful of states will determine the winner, in some by margins in the low thousands. The House and Senate are both tossups.

Wherever you are in the world, if you aren't terrified you're not paying attention. Just consider this:

Trump triggered wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, which so far have taken at least 250,000 lives. His self-focused pandemic response abruptly and painfully killed more than twice as many Americans he was sworn to protect.

This is a brief on what the world faces if he comes back, cushioned by sycophants, with the power to plunge Earth into nuclear winter. That is an unlikely extreme. But at the minimum, a delirious ignoramus intends to implant an autocracy ruled by the rich.

It all depends on how many of those 25 million persuadables think of their own families' future — along with everyone else's — and show up to cast a ballot.

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